The steel gray clouds feel lower here. There is an eerie quiet broken by the crunching of gravel beneath our shoes. We are waking between horizontal slabs of stone marking the old railroad tracks and a white ribbon, winding through the trees, marked with the names of Treblinka’s victims. Nothing of the camp remains standing. Now there are just monuments and trees.
The silence is fitting. This place deserves to be still now. The camp was in operation for 13 months. In those 13 months 900,000 people were killed. 67 escaped. It is impossible to understand how anyone was able to avoid being killed. Jews were taken from the train, stripped of their possessions and marched into the gas chamber. There were no barracks, no beds, no cells. People were brought here to be turned into corpses.
In a single day up to 17,000 people would be killed. This number is remembered by fragmented stones that sit on top of concrete covered mass graves. These stones have the names of villages and towns that no longer exist. Among the countless names of places, one person is memorialized, Janus Korczak.
Korczak ran the orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. When his children were selected to be sent to Treblinka, Korczak was given a pass. He, however refused to abandon his children. He accompanied them from the ghetto, onto the train and all the way to the end. The weight of that decision lies heavy around us. Hearing just this one story is heartbreaking. Waking away there are 899,999 stories that we will never know.
Journey to Poland 