Albert Marrin - A Light in the Darkness: Janusz Korczak, His Orphans, and the Holocaust

Gone now are those little towns where the wind joined

Biblical songs with Polish tunes and Slavic rue,

Where old Jews in orchards in the shade of cherry trees

Lamented for the holy walls of Jerusalem.

Gone now are those little towns, though the poetic mists,

The moons, winds, ponds, and stars above them

Have recorded in the blood of centuries the tragic tales,

The histories of the two saddest nations on earth.

Antoni Sonimski, Elegy for the Little Jewish Towns (1947)

If you want to visit that place from Warsaw, the capital of Poland, it is best to go by automobile. You can drive yourself or hire a car and a guide for about eighty dollars. With a little luck, the sixty-mile trip should take just over two hours.

Upon leaving Warsaw, located on both sides of the Vistula River, head northeast on the highway that parallels the Warsaw-Biaystok railroad, which goes to the Russian border. About two miles after crossing a bridge over the River Bug, you must turn right at the village of Makinia Junction. Here the road follows a branch line linking to the main rail line from the southeast. You are almost there. Another three and a half miles brings you to a quiet village nestled beside the tracks. You cant miss it. The road sign says TREBLINKA .

Beginning in July 1942, engines towing boxcars crammed with Jewish people from Warsaw left the Treblinka station on a newly built two-mile-long sidetrack, or spur. Twice a day, every day, rain or shine, slow-moving trains passed through a damp, sandy plain dotted with marshes and pinewoods. After a while, iron wheels screeched to a halt at the gate of the Treblinka extermination camp.

The railroad station at the Polish village of Treblinka, where transports stopped on the way to the Treblinka death camp. (Date unknown)

During World War II (19391945), in which 47 million Europeans perished, over 60 percent of them civilians, Treblinka played a key role in the HolocaustShoah in Hebrew. Both terms refer to the effort by Nazi Germany, ruled by Adolf Hitler, to murder first Polish Jews, then all Jews in the countries German armies conquered. History records countless atrocities. Yet the Holocaust is unique, because it is the only time a nations leaders had the goal of systematically murdering every man, woman, and child of an ethnic or religious group. As British prime minister Winston Churchill said at the time: There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.

By the close of 1942, after only 155 days of operation, an astounding 713,555 peoplean average of 4,600 a day, or almost 200 an hournearly all Jews, had died in Treblinkas gas chambers. Auschwitz, the best-known and most infamous camp, also killed Jews, about 1.2 million, plus a quarter of a million non-Jewish Poles and Gypsies. Besides being an extermination center, Auschwitz was a massive complex of factories served by tens of thousands of slave laborers. Treblinka was a factory, too, though designed to manufacture a single producthuman corpses. In its time, it was the most lethal spot on planet Earth.

Today, visitors to Treblinka park a short distance from the campsite. Then they walk along a line of concrete sleepers, symbols of the wooden rail ties that supported the tracks over which the death trains rolled. Unlike Auschwitz, whose buildings survive, nothing of the original camp remains. To hide their crimes, in 1943, as Soviet armies advanced, the Nazis bulldozed Treblinka. Now a visitors center sells guidebooks, diagrams, and DVDs, but not T-shirts; few tourists would dream of wearing a garment bearing the name of such a place.

To enter the campsite is to enter a world of stone monuments. Stones are important in the Jewish tradition; Jews leave stones, rather than flowers, as signs of respect at gravesites. The main monument at Treblinka is a massive stone structure, twenty-six feet in height. It is dedicated to the memory of the Jews murdered there, the vast majority of them Polish. No nation suffered as did Poland during World War II. The first victim of Nazi aggression, Poland had a prewar population of 33 million, and approximately one-tenth, or 3.3 million, of its people were Jewish. When the war ended, the Nazis had killed no fewer than 6 million Poles, of whom about half were Jewish.

A symbolic stone cemetery surrounds the main monument. It is symbolic, for Treblinkas victims have no graves. After people were gassed, the Nazis buried and later disinterred and burned their bodies. The cemetery consists of seventeen hundred jagged pieces of granite of various sizes set in concrete. Each piece represents a Polish community from which the Nazis sent Jews to Treblinka. The sizes are proportional to the number of Jews killed from a given place. Many of the smallest stones have no inscriptions at all. This indicates that those communities, tiny as they were, entirely disappeared. Not a soul survived.

One granite stone rises above the rest, and it bears a word in Polish: Warszawa. This is as it should be, for what English speakers call Warsaw was the most Jewish of cities, its community second in size only to New Yorks. On the eve of World War II, 1.2 million people lived in Warsaw, of whom 375,000 were Jewish, a number equal to the entire Jewish population of France. A center of business, learning, and the arts, the city was, for Eastern European Jews,