Treblinka
66 years ago today, on July 24, 1942, the gates of Treblinka II opened. In this extermination camp at least 700,000 people, vast majority of them Jews, were killed, including the 310,000 deported from the Warsaw ghetto. Some estimates for the number of victims are as high as 1.4 million. I have no words to describe the horrors, no mental capacity to process this kind of numbers, where every single one represents a human life.
But others did manage to write and document one of the worst places in human history. The library has several accounts of what happened. Jean-Francois Steiner‘s father was killed in Treblinka. Twenty years later (Treblinka was published in 1966 in French) Steiner pieced together the story from scattered records and interviews with the survivors and created a unique blend of history and novel. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her preface,
“The horrors evoked in its day-to-day banality and almost as if they were natural. In a voice that rejects any overly human inflection, the author describes a dehumanized world.”
The bulk of another book–edited by Alexander Donat, titled “The Death Camp Treblinka; a Documentary,” and published in 1979–is made up by six individual eyewitness accounts. Donat was a survivor. His intention for the book is stated in the introduction, “I dedicate this Scroll of mourning and anger to the memory of the men, women, and children who became the ashes of Treblinka.” The purpose being to document Treblinka the book includes 20 pages of pictures, a detailed list of “hangmen, rebels and survivors,” and excerpts from the first and second Treblinka trials.
Donat wrote two books before the title mentioned above. We have his memoir from 1965, “The Holocaust Kingdom.” This, being the whole account to what he went through between 1939 and 1945, contains events taking places outside Treblinka, but gives a context for that experience. We do not have a copy of Donat’s first book from 1964, “Jewish Resistance.”
The last book I would like to draw your attention to in relation to Treblinka is Yitzhak Arad‘s “Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps.” The book’s first half, titled “The extermination machine” expounds the details of the “Final Solution.” The short middle section describes “Life in the shadow of death.” The second half of the book is about “Escape and resistance.” This item places the horrors of Treblinka in yet another context, how it was part of the machine that killed 6,000,000.
Let me close this post with Donat’s description of what Treblinka was,
“[It] was the reign of ultimate undiluted evil, the mesmerizing dread of unmitigated terror, combined with masterly delusion and camouflage.”
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