Treblinka

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Visiting the Treblinka death camp was a very overpowering experience. It was a camp that was completely demolished by the Nazis before they were taken over so there is absolutely no sign that anything bad ever happened there. If there weren’t monuments there, a person would think that it was just a forest. Before we went to the memorials or ventured into where the camp was, we stopped outside of a building and listened to a tape telling us about the history of the camp and how over 800,000 people had died at the camp. It was built in 1941 and started out as a labor camp. It was made to look like a nice place when people arrived, including signs to shops and bathrooms further down, but, as they entered, they quickly realized it was not a happy place. Soon there became two camps, when in 1942 the gas chamber was created and an area was made for the death camp. From the area where they undressed and the women’s heads were shaved, they had to walk through an area of bushes that made a sharp, 90 degree turn where they entered into the “showers”. Along this path, the victims were whipped at and terrorized with dogs to make sure that they stayed in line and to also get their heart beats up so that they died faster. Gas chambers were so full that people couldn’t move and would climb on top of each other to get the last bit of air and ended up dying in piles. It took 20-30 minutes to kill everyone in the chamber and about 2 hours in total, from when they got off of the train to when they pulled the bodies out and cremated them. The killing rate averaged about 2000 people per day; that would be like killing our high school and junior high every single day. I can’t even imagine that many people every day for over a year. When they later built a larger gas chamber in 1943, they created it to accommodate 500 people instead of about 200. Most of the Jews killed were from Eastern Europe, mainly Poland. August 2^nd 1943, an uprising took place in the camp. 600 prisoners partook. It consisted of them catching some of the barracks on fire, but they were not able to destroy the gas chambers. Some survived and escaped the camp which is what caused the Nazis to destroy the camp. They did not want there to be proof that such atrocities took place.

Now when you visit, they have reconstructed a platform where the Jews were taken off of the trains and have placed large stones down the path where the tracks were. Walking the same path the prisoners took, you walk to a large stone monument where they believe the gas chamber was and all you see surrounding it is 30000 stones in remembrance of the people that died at the camp. Some stones have the different names of the towns where the victims were from. One of the things that I kept picturing was that for every stone, there were about 28 people that should be in its place. That many people would have had to fill up the entire field if they were there. It was just a surreal experience to stand there were hundreds of thousands of people were murdered and are still laid there. When we had our moment of silence, I could hear the screams and noises of what I imagine the camp to be like and felt a wave of pain and sorrow come over me. I still can’t fathom what life must have been like there and do not think that I want to. It was one of those almost out of body experiences that you know will haunt you for years to come.
By the time we got back to the hotel, none of us were ready to go out to a restaurant or anything so a group of us went to the grocery store in the bottom of the mall and stocked up on snacks for the next few days. We did end up going to a restaurant later called the Sphinx where all of the waiters were male and kind of rude. It was good food though.

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