Warning: The descriptions of atrocities below are graphic and horrible. You might not want to read them if you don't want to have your day ruined.
Yesterday we visited Treblinka, thankfully completing our tour of concentration camps and death camps after Terezin and Auschwitz. After Auschwitz I felt inspired to do something to educate and stop genocide in the world. After Treblinka I am just exhausted and emotionally drained. It is not that Treblinka was harder, but that it was later in our trip, after I had already seen a lot more, and I could only take in so much. The hardest part of our trip was actually not any of the camps, but a video we watched in a museum a few days ago about the Warsaw Ghetto. After this video, I started to shut down. The camps were more tolerable because there is actually not much left to see. As Olivier described in his blog post about our trip there, the Nazis completely destroyed Treblinka, and we know about it only because a prisoner who escaped wrote books and drew sketches, so now there is nothing left but a beautiful memorial. The video was much harder because it consisted of actual footage taken by Nazi soldiers during the war. The footage conveys such horror that it is hard to comprehend how anyone could film such things: children starving on the street, people collecting corpses on rickety carts, and those corpses being dumped into mass graves. There was also footage of children sneaking out through holes in the wall to smuggle in food from the outside, and of children who had been caught doing this and shot. I can't imagine how they got the footage of the children sneaking through the wall. Did the Nazis happen upon them, film them, and then shoot them? It is incomprehensible. After seeing the horrible suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto, it almost seemed like it would have been a blessing to be sent straight to Treblinka, deceived about your destination until the last possible minute, and then killed quickly. There were many layers of deception: they often made people buy their own train tickets, and gave them baggage check tickets, telling them to hold onto them so they could collect their baggage after they arrived. The building where they sorted belongings was painted on the outside to look like a normal building, and the path to the gas chamber was curved so they couldn't see where they were going. It was called "the path to heaven."
While there was nothing left to see of the actual death camp of Treblinka, there was a model in the small museum, reconstructed from reports from escaped prisoners. Seeing this model, I was struck by how large the building for sorting through people's belongings was compared to the building where prisoners lived. Hardly anyone lived here; almost everyone was sent straight to the tiny gas chamber, and they kept alive only enough people to deal with the bodies. The largest thing on the camp was the pits dug with excavators for burying the bodies. They buried the bodies until the Nazis discovered a Soviet mass grave and publicly accused the Soviets of mass murder. They then realized that the same thing could happen to them, so they started to hide the evidence of their own mass murder by digging up and burning the bodies. Unlike Auschwitz, there were no crematoria and Treblinka, only a long grill like a giant barbecue, on which they piled all the bodies at once and burned them. Instead of Zyklon B, the gas chamber here used carbon monoxide from a diesel motor. To fit more people in, they told people to raise their arms up, and then they threw the children and babies on top. This last piece of information was more than I could bear, and I shut down even more after hearing this.
Treblinka is two hours from Warsaw, in the middle of nowhere, in a peaceful pine forest with birds chirping. I think some people felt comforted by the isolation of it, but I couldn't stop thinking about how the Nazis chose this isolated place to hide what they did, and I didn't feel safe there.
I was very relieved when we got back on the bus to Warsaw, and I knew I was done visiting such places. I've enjoyed Poland and would come back, but I have no interest in going back to these camps any time soon, if ever. I think it was important to visit these places and bear witness, so I'm glad I went, but I'm also really glad it's over, and am looking forward to going home.
Yesterday we visited Treblinka, thankfully completing our tour of concentration camps and death camps after Terezin and Auschwitz. After Auschwitz I felt inspired to do something to educate and stop genocide in the world. After Treblinka I am just exhausted and emotionally drained. It is not that Treblinka was harder, but that it was later in our trip, after I had already seen a lot more, and I could only take in so much. The hardest part of our trip was actually not any of the camps, but a video we watched in a museum a few days ago about the Warsaw Ghetto. After this video, I started to shut down. The camps were more tolerable because there is actually not much left to see. As Olivier described in his blog post about our trip there, the Nazis completely destroyed Treblinka, and we know about it only because a prisoner who escaped wrote books and drew sketches, so now there is nothing left but a beautiful memorial. The video was much harder because it consisted of actual footage taken by Nazi soldiers during the war. The footage conveys such horror that it is hard to comprehend how anyone could film such things: children starving on the street, people collecting corpses on rickety carts, and those corpses being dumped into mass graves. There was also footage of children sneaking out through holes in the wall to smuggle in food from the outside, and of children who had been caught doing this and shot. I can't imagine how they got the footage of the children sneaking through the wall. Did the Nazis happen upon them, film them, and then shoot them? It is incomprehensible. After seeing the horrible suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto, it almost seemed like it would have been a blessing to be sent straight to Treblinka, deceived about your destination until the last possible minute, and then killed quickly. There were many layers of deception: they often made people buy their own train tickets, and gave them baggage check tickets, telling them to hold onto them so they could collect their baggage after they arrived. The building where they sorted belongings was painted on the outside to look like a normal building, and the path to the gas chamber was curved so they couldn't see where they were going. It was called "the path to heaven."
While there was nothing left to see of the actual death camp of Treblinka, there was a model in the small museum, reconstructed from reports from escaped prisoners. Seeing this model, I was struck by how large the building for sorting through people's belongings was compared to the building where prisoners lived. Hardly anyone lived here; almost everyone was sent straight to the tiny gas chamber, and they kept alive only enough people to deal with the bodies. The largest thing on the camp was the pits dug with excavators for burying the bodies. They buried the bodies until the Nazis discovered a Soviet mass grave and publicly accused the Soviets of mass murder. They then realized that the same thing could happen to them, so they started to hide the evidence of their own mass murder by digging up and burning the bodies. Unlike Auschwitz, there were no crematoria and Treblinka, only a long grill like a giant barbecue, on which they piled all the bodies at once and burned them. Instead of Zyklon B, the gas chamber here used carbon monoxide from a diesel motor. To fit more people in, they told people to raise their arms up, and then they threw the children and babies on top. This last piece of information was more than I could bear, and I shut down even more after hearing this.
Treblinka is two hours from Warsaw, in the middle of nowhere, in a peaceful pine forest with birds chirping. I think some people felt comforted by the isolation of it, but I couldn't stop thinking about how the Nazis chose this isolated place to hide what they did, and I didn't feel safe there.
I was very relieved when we got back on the bus to Warsaw, and I knew I was done visiting such places. I've enjoyed Poland and would come back, but I have no interest in going back to these camps any time soon, if ever. I think it was important to visit these places and bear witness, so I'm glad I went, but I'm also really glad it's over, and am looking forward to going home.
No comments:
Post a Comment