Treblinka is an impossibly beautiful memorial. Absolutely nothing is left of the camp that once stood there. It is hard to imagine it being the case, but we have to remember that the Nazis were masters of deception and made a point of dismantling these camps to allow for possible denial later on. In the same way, no one was supposed to leave these extermination camps alive, in order to prevent any kind of potential testimony at a future time. We only know about Treblinka because the Nazis didn’t succeed in eliminating all witnesses, precisely because these witnesses—namely the Jewish inmates they kept around to run this impeccably oiled death machine—figured out that the Nazis would never let anyone survive and staged a successful revolt on August 2nd, 1943, where they overtook the guards and escaped. At the end of the war about 50 of them were still alive. They had made a pact to testify once freed, which was the motivator for their rising, and so a few of them did. Without them, without their act of incredible courage, we would know nothing about Treblinka. In extermination camps where not one person survived, like Chelmno, all memory has been erased. To the point where many have never even heard of Chelmno at all.
The memorial that is Treblinka consists of a large clearing carved out of the forest the Nazis had planted to cover up their ignominious crime. It was designed by a non-Jewish Polish artist in the 60’s under Poland’s communist regime. A couple of concrete blocks made to look like two panels of a half opened gate welcome you into the space. The path on which you walk is made of uneven stones sticking out of the dirt, made to keep you off balance as you walk and slightly twist your ankles with each step. On the right of the stone-path are a series of concrete slabs aligned to represent the train track’s sleepers leading to the recreated platform where the cattle cars were emptied and men and women separated before being ushered into the undressing rooms at the end of their voyage.
From the platform we walked toward the main monument of stones towering at the center of the main clearing and made to look like the Jerusalem Western Wall with tortured bodies rising from its top. This concrete monument stands where the gas chambers once stood. As you walk toward this monument, a dozen or so stones lined up to your right have the names of the different countries from which Jews were taken to Treblinka engraved on them. As you approach you then discover a sea of stones (like burial stones), of every size and shape as far as the eyes can see. 17,000 of them. 17,000 to commemorate the 17,000 Jews per day who were killed there at the peak of Treblinka’s lethal efficiency. No word can describe how beautiful and emotional seeing such a sight is; a reaction you were not prepared for that completely overwhelms you. You are compelled to begin a slow, deeply meditative, wandering walk between these stones many of which have the names of the towns and villages the Jews who died here were taken from. My mind began to tell the stories of these stones, of these lives. The small ones were the children; the tiny ones were the babies. The taller ones were mothers and fathers, those that looked more tattered were the grand-parents. It was shockingly beautiful because its vastness, the thousands of stones spreading forever in front, next to, and behind you, gave you a concrete visual idea of what 17,000 lives standing side by side that one day represented. And then, the next day, another 17,000 “stones” would be brought in to be murdered. Reading or saying “17,000” will never capture the reality of it. Five digits can’t conjure up in our mind the physical reality they poorly attempt to represent. But to walk between these 17,000 rocks and then sit down at the base of one of them and meditate for a while in their presence is the most moving experience one can ever have.
I didn’t know what visiting the death camps would be like, and it has been a different experience for each of us. I must admit that I had reservations, maybe even concerns about being in these places. Often when I talked to people about going to the death camps before the trip, I found their negative reaction to only add to my ambivalence. Who would want to go to what we pre-judge being dark, dreary, awful places? But being in Auschwitz, being in Birkenau or in Treblinka have been nothing but. They each in their own way reach down to previously untouched places in our soul, bypassing all the ego stuff that gets in our way, and leaving us naked and raw in facing the human experience that they are. We come too late. There is nothing we can do about the death and the suffering. The part of us that wants to jump in and help, that wants to fix things, finds itself utterly defeated. All that is left is to acknowledge our powerlessness, bear witness and honor the countless lives that were lost by, perhaps tomorrow, living our lives a little better, a little more lovingly, a little more compassionately and, most importantly, with more integrity; vowing to never let our voice be drown in the silent majority of the self-centered cowards. Silence kills.
One last note. It took my mom a good couple of hours before she was able to speak again, after leaving Treblinka. The two of us went for a walk through the streets of Warsaw’s gorgeous old-city as soon as we got back. I had noticed that in the bus, during the two hours of our drive back, she had been capturing some of her thoughts on her phone’s “notes.” She, too, had been upset at first by the meticulousness with which the Nazis had dismantled and erased all traces of the camp. She noted, however, that compared to Auschwitz-Birkenau where most of the camps’ structures were left standing, the desert that the Nazis left in Treblinka allowed for a memorial a hundred times more powerful to rise from its (and our) ashes. The presence of those they attempted to erase from humanity’s memory could never be felt more powerfully than amidst the sea of stones of this incredible memorial.
I will be posting pictures of Treblinka on my Facebook page.