I expected Treblinka to be an empty grassy field. That’s its reputation, nothing to see there the way there is at Auschwitz or Majdanek.

It was raining when we pulled up, so we stayed on the bus and listened to Rabbi Guttman tell us about Treblinka while we ate lunch. By the time we were done eating the rain had stopped, and we had some time alone to walk the grounds and reflect.

The site is a huge open space, and I headed for the back right corner because I wanted to be by myself. From a distance it looked like there was nothing there, but as I got closer I saw a pink granite stone sitting in the grass. Then I noticed others like it, weathered the same way and set in a rough rectangle. Someone had placed them there deliberately years ago, and I wondered why. I looked at a map of the site and realized I was standing at the original gas chamber. The Nazis had gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure nobody would ever know it was there.

They tore this camp down so there would be nothing left to see. Three months after prisoners staged an uprising in August 1943, the Germans dismantled every building, plowed the ground, and planted it over with lupine, a purple wildflower. They built a farmhouse on the site using bricks salvaged from the demolished gas chambers and put a Ukrainian guard family there to pretend it was just an ordinary farm.

About 900,000 people were murdered here, nearly all of them Polish Jews, over the course of a year and a half. That makes it the second deadliest site of the Holocaust after Auschwitz.

Most people haven’t heard of Treblinka the way they’ve heard of Auschwitz. Auschwitz operated for years as a hybrid complex holding enormous numbers of forced laborers, many of whom lived to tell their stories. But Treblinka was built strictly as a death camp, and most people who got off the train there were dead within two hours. The few people known to have survived it were nearly all escapees from the 1943 uprising. There was almost no one left to tell anyone what had happened there.

For nearly seventy years the cover-up held. Early postwar visitors found only an empty, quiet field with no visible ruins left behind, and Holocaust deniers used that emptiness to argue that nothing had ever happened there.

The breakthrough came around 2010, when a British archaeologist named Caroline Sturdy Colls became the first person granted permission to survey the site. Jewish law forbids disturbing graves, so she worked with ground-penetrating radar instead of shovels. The scans found buried brick foundations right where survivors had said the gas chambers were. A later dig turned up floor tiles from a factory in Opoczno, stamped with the maker’s star. The team placed that pink granite stone to mark the corner where the gas chamber once stood.

I mentioned the uprising already, in passing. Here’s what happened.

In the spring of 1943, a secret prisoner-led resistance network began planning the revolt. When a lock on the German armory broke, a Jewish locksmith named Eugeniusz Turowski was sent to fix it, and he made a wax impression and cut a copy of the key. On the afternoon of the revolt, two crates of grenades were smuggled out of the warehouse in the waste cart of an eleven-year-old boy. Thirty-seven rifles went out with the prisoner who hauled clay. There were not enough weapons to go around.

The uprising broke out on August 2, 1943. There were about 840 prisoners in the camp that day, and hundreds joined the fight, storming the arsenal and setting fire to the buildings. A Polish railway worker named Franciszek Ząbecki photographed the thick smoke rising from a distance.

It was the first major armed revolt in an Operation Reinhard camp. About 400 prisoners made it out the gate, and fewer than a hundred of them were still alive at the end of the war. They are most of the reason anyone knows what this place was.

Walking back through the field of stones, two of them stopped me. There are 17,000 of them set into the field, standing in as headstones because there was no cemetery here and no bodies to bury. Only 216 carry a name. All but one of those is the name of a town.

I found the Kielce stone, one of those 216. It marks one of the largest single deportations that fed the camp. Kielce lies in central Poland, where the Germans forced about 27,000 Jews into a ghetto in 1941 and then emptied it over five days that August. Around 21,000 people were put on trains straight to Treblinka. Others were shot in the streets and the Jewish cemetery.

The single exception to all those town names is a rock with three lines cut into it: JANUSZ KORCZAK, then HENRYK GOLDSZMIT in parentheses underneath, followed by I DZIECI. Goldszmit was the name he was born with and Korczak was the name he wrote under. When I looked up the translation of “I dzieci,” I saw that it means “and the children.”

Janusz Korczak was a Polish-Jewish pediatrician and educator who ran a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. Long before the war, he built a self-governing system for his orphans based on deep respect for children’s dignity, with a children’s parliament, a peer court with its own code written by the children themselves, and a children’s newspaper. When his orphans were ordered to Treblinka on August 5, 1942, Korczak was offered safe passage out of the ghetto for himself alone. He refused and marched with his children to the transport instead, and stayed with them to the end.

Someone had been at Korczak’s memorial rock recently. Flowers sat in a stone urn, a small Israeli flag was pushed into the gravel, and stones had been carefully piled on top of the memorial. Rabbi Guttman had told us that Jews leave stones on graves because, unlike flowers, they are permanent.

From there a path led into the woods. I followed it, and it came out at a grove of young trees. Las Korczakowski. The Korczak Forest, launched in 2020 by the Treblinka Museum and the Polish Janusz Korczak Association, with schools and community groups from across Poland and abroad still planting memorial trees.

There are display boards at the clearing, a whole exhibition about Korczak put together by the museum. That’s where I learned that decades before any of this, Korczak had worked at summer camps in this region, tutoring poor children from Warsaw. One of the tree plaques carries a line of his. Nie ma dzieci, są ludzie. There are no children, there are people. It was the argument of his whole life, that a child’s dignity should weigh the same as everyone else’s.

When I came back out of the trees, it was almost time to leave, and the group had gathered around the burn pit memorial, marked now by black pyramid caps low in the grass, each one hiding a memorial lamp. Cantor Gabrielle Clissold sang, and then four of the Jewish leaders traveling with us said the Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. We all stood there and cried.

---

I just returned from an intensive week in Poland traveling alongside a group of North Carolina educators to study Holocaust history firsthand, made possible through the generous sponsorship of the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT). I am deeply grateful to NCCAT for their support.

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring what we witnessed on the ground, paired with further independent research, as we carry these hard truths back to our classrooms and communities.

Justin Parmenter
Charlotte, NC

This is part of an ongoing series. See more at Holocaust Education: Reflections from Poland.