Back during the Holocaust, few Americans had ever heard of Treblinka, a death camp hidden in the remote forests of northeastern Poland.  It was located 50 miles northeast of Warsaw.  Most Americans believed that the majority of the 6 million Jews died in gas chambers in Dachau, a camp near Munich, Germany.  They were surely wrong, in the short time Treblinka was a camp it claimed a total of 800,000 lives of people from Poland, Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Jugoslavia, Germany, and the Soviet Union.  Treblinka was located near the Bug River which, during the World War Two served as the border for the Nazis and Poland.  Jews were not the only people killed at Treblinka, some 2,000 gypsies were killed there.  The camp was run by Imfried Eberl and later Franz Stangl.  Treblinka got it's name from a tiny village close to the camp.  The town was closest to Malkinia railroad junction, on which the Nazis hauled thousands of Jews in freight cars to Nazi extermination camps.  
       Treblinka was the last of the three "Action Reinhard" death camps to be built.  Construction of the camp began in May/June of 1942 and the exterminations began in July. 
       Together with Belzec and Sobibor, it served as the destination for over a million people, almost all of who were Jews, they were killed almost immediately upon arrival.  None of them lived to see the next day.  The Israeli court declared that more that 850,000 Jews were exterminated at Treblinka between July 1942 and August 1943, and that is just Jews.  In fact, shortly after the war one former prisoner and the World Jewish Congress said that 3 million people died there.  Treblinka is widely regarded as the second most important German extermination center.  Only Auschwitz-Birkenau is said to have claimed more lives. 
        The inner fence of Treblinka was covered by tree branches to conceal the activities within.  In August 1943 a core group of fifty to seventy men planned to take weapons from the camp armory to destroy the camp installation and allow inmates to flee to the forest.  Of the 750 men that tried to escape only 70 lived to see liberation.
         Not all prisoners were immediately gassed, some were selected to work as laborers to keep the killing going and then later on were selected to be gassed.  Trainloads of up to 5 to 7 thousand people were brought to Treblinka.  Prisoners were then moved through a selection in which women and children were separated from the men.  if you were too sick to walk then you were taken to an infirmary pit and shot.  After being separated they took them to get there hair cut.  Lastly, you were taken to the gas chambers.  Treblinka started out with 3 gas chambers but quickly built at least 6 more.  Prisoners were put in what they thought were showers, so they were told, but once they all got in there the Nazi officers would turn on the gas and it would come out through shower heads.  Some would stand there for 30 or 40 minutes before they died.  They were then searched for valuables.  After the search the bodies were stacked on old grid railroad tracks to be burned.  They used to bury them but they ran out of ground. The gas chambers were then cleaned and readied for the next group of prisoners.
         There is no documentary evidence that Treblinka was an extermination center.  In fact, contemporary records suggest that the camp had a very different purpose.  Photos suggest that it was actually a transit camp.  Also the camp's burial area quite obviously appears too small to contain the hundreds of thousands of bodies supposedly buried there.  The generally accepted idea was that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed at Treblinka in gas chambers with poisonous exhaust from engines.  But the "original" Treblinka extermination story was that Jews were steamed in "steam chambers".
          As the Allied forces got closer in the fall of 1943, evacuation of the camp began.  Orders were given to destroy the camp so that no traces of it's existence remain.  A farm was built over the site of Treblinka and a Ukrainian was selected to run it.
          Today, if you visited the site where Treblinka stood you are very likely to have an eerie experience.  Visitors enter the camp through the same door that deported Jews entered.  In the center of an open field lies a mass grave and a memorial with a huge crack down the middle of it, intended to express the wickedness of the place.  As seen below.

       This is a picture of the memorial at Treblinka with the huge crack down the middle.  The field is supposed to express the wickedness of the death camp.
Meg Guindon

7th Rossville Jr. High

Spring 2001

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