Few have heard of the Treblinka uprising, perhaps because the camp commanders pretended it never happened. Yet dozens of Jews who took up arms against their oppressors survived, a living testimony to the stubborn struggle against the ultimate evilt

For the staff of the Treblinka death camp, Monday morning, August 2, 1943, dawned routinely. The SS officers went about their duties. Prisoners were rounded up for morning roll call, given their meager breakfast of a little hot water and a piece of moldy bread, and dispersed for work. Camp commander Franz Stangl was waiting at home for the arrival of Lieutenant Greuer from the Vaslov unit, whose Soviet soldiers had deserted their own army and were cooperating with the Nazis at the behest of their commander, General Andrey Vaslov. Stangl noticed nothing out of the ordinary, nor did the Ukrainian guards posted around the camp and high in its surrounding watchtowers. The oppressive heat presaged nothing of the events about to unfold.

But the 850 Jewish prisoners smelled tension in the air. They noticed the nervous excitement surrounding the members of the underground resistance that had coalesced in the previous months. The night before, the rebels had huddled in their final meeting, lit by flames erupting from the pits where the bodies of the camp’s victims had been thrown. The last whispered details were exchanged. Silver-haired Zev Kurland, eldest of the group and the camp’s hospital kapo (prisoner functionary), was dressed as always in his doctor’s coat. He swore to fight to the death to destroy the sadistic madness the Germans had created in Treblinka. After him, all swore likewise.

 

Death Factory

As the Wehrmacht forces invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, four death squads (Einsatzgruppen) accompanied them in order to eliminate the Jewish population in the conquered territories of eastern Poland, Ukraine, White Russia, and the Baltic states. At first, Jews were rounded up in forest clearings or valleys – or at the edge of vast pits they’d dug themselves – and then systematically shot. Many local Christians pitched in, lightening the load on German personnel drained by weeks of executions. Watching the murder of a hundred or so Jews from Minsk, SS Overgruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski commented to SS commander Heinrich Himmler:

Look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando, how deeply shaken they are! These men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics, or savages! (Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews [New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985], vol. 1, p. 332)

Yet the operation was wasteful, slow, and shockingly exposed. A more efficient and discreet method had to be found. So Hitler turned to Philipp Bouhler, chief of Hitler’s chancellery, and Viktor Brack, one of its department directors, who had been among the architects of the Nazi euthanasia program to dispose of unfit Germans – the disabled, sickly, and mentally ill. These bureaucrats’ first suggestion was to use the gas vans they’d employed to put thousands of infirm Germans to death. This solution, tried in the Chelmno death camp, proved too unwieldly. It would have required hundreds if not thousands of such camps to murder the entire Jewish population of central and western Poland.

The sadistic duo realized they needed camps built specifically for mass execution by gas. Later their plan was dubbed “Operation Reinhard,” after Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich’s Main Security Office (which included the Gestapo and the death squads), who was killed by Czech partisans in the spring of 1942. The conception and construction of the camps was the work of Odilo Globocnik, SS and police chief of Lublin. Globocnik built three camps; Belzec for the Jews of Galicia, Sobibor for the Jews of Lublin, and Treblinka for the Jews of Warsaw and Radom. Treblinka was by far the largest.

Work began on Treblinka in the spring of 1942. A site was chosen in the heart of a heavily wooded, lightly populated area, and Polish and Jewish prisoners from a nearby penal and labor camp served as construction workers.

The camp measured four hundred by six hundred meters, divided into two sections: “the lower camp,” including staff and prisoners’ barracks, warehouses, and a reception area where a railway platform was built; and “the upper camp,” an extermination complex with gas chambers and huge burial pits.

Two barbed wire fences, about five meters apart and four meters high, encircled the camp. Pine branches were woven into the inner fence, shrouding what went on inside. Linking the reception area to the extermination center was a winding path about a hundred meters long, which the Nazis perversely dubbed Himmelstrasse – the road to heaven. It led to three gas chambers, each four by four meters, disguised as showers.

A lazaret, or hospital facility, was later added close to the southern fence, for the disabled and sick arriving in the transports. Surrounded by hedges, with a Red Cross sign overhead for authenticity, this “medical center” actually contained a pit twelve meters long and lined with benches. Prisoners were seated, then shot, and their bodies pushed into the pit, where a fire burned constantly to consume them.

Fittingly, the first transport arrived at Treblinka from the Warsaw ghetto on 9 Av (July 23), 1942. The ghetto’s population was then 350,000, all of whom had experienced the cruelty of their Nazi oppressors and Polish accomplices firsthand. Packed into the ghetto through brutal winters and stifling summers, suffering forced labor, abuse, epidemics, and the ravages of hunger, over a hundred thousand had already died here.

Trains were expected to deliver six thousand people a day to “labor camps in the east.” These transports were to be filled by the head of the Judenrat, or Jewish Council, Adam Czerniaków, but he preferred suicide. Crammed into cattle cars a hundred at a time, sixty cars in each train, the Jews made the journey to Treblinka, which lasted up to two days. As the train approached the Treblinka station, it emitted a long hoot. The platform’s length meant that only twenty carriages could be unloaded at a time, with SS guards lining up along the way.

As soon as the doors opened, chaos ensued as the deportees spilled out and SS personnel hurried them on with harsh shouts and truncheon blows. Men were immediately directed to the right, and women and children to the left. Signs in Polish and German announced that this was a transit camp en route to a labor facility, and that all arrivals required disinfection. Changing huts were the next stop. . People were then forced to run the whole way to the gas chambers, trying desperately to escape the guards’ blows and attack dogs. When the chambers were full, the doors closed, and the order was given to turn on the gas. Three Jews were made to play music in order to drown out the screams.

Fifteen minutes later, there was nothing but bodies. At first they were buried in enormous pits, but after less than a year a decision was taken to exhume these corpses and burn them along with all subsequent victims.

Two months later, on Yom Kippur of 1942, the last transport of 2,200 arrived, including the ghetto’s Jewish police, who’d run the operation at its Warsaw end. All together, over 250,000 people were murdered in the liquidation of the ghetto