Polish daily "Gazeta Wyborcza" just published an article in which I and Jan Grabowski describe our concerns with the current "memorial" situation in Treblinka and the threats ahead.
Below, please find an English translation of the article:
We do not know and will never know how many people were murdered in Treblinka.
Estimates range from 750,000 to 950,000 victims. A mere trifle, a spread equal to the current population of Częstochowa or Radom. Either way, we are talking about one of the greatest crimes in human history. The care and maintenance of these few hectares of meadows and forests, where to this day the earth constantly brings to the surface unburned fragments of the victims' bones, is the responsibility of the Polish state, which has become the custodian of this place of Jewish tragedy.
In the immediate post-war years, the site of the extermination camp became the scene of a terrible practice of desecrating human remains, hunting for gold teeth and any valuable items overlooked by the Germans and their accomplices while the “death factory” was operating at full capacity. Jan Tomasz Gross wrote about these terrible excavations in “Golden Harvest,” and a number of journalists took up the topic after him.
Years passed. A monument and a field of stones commemorating the exterminated Jewish communities, whose inhabitants ended up in the ovens of Treblinka, were erected on the site of the gas chambers and cremation grates. The whole area was covered with concrete, which put an end to the amateur excavations of Jewish gold seekers. Soon, however, the desecration of human remains was replaced by the desecration of memory.
Among the boulders commemorating the Jewish communities exterminated in Treblinka, stones with the inscriptions “Jedwabne” and “Radziłów” suddenly appeared. As we know, the Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne and Radziłów did not die in Treblinka at the hands of the Germans, but at home, at the hands of Poles. Despite numerous requests, the management of the Treblinka museum refused to remove the monuments. The stones remain where they are, silently confirming the maxim that whoever has power is right.
The Treblinka Museum covers two camps: Treblinka II, which operated in 1942-43 and was the aforementioned site of the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Polish and European Jews, and Treblinka I, a labor camp that operated from 1941 to 1944. Jews and Poles worked there in inhumane conditions, except that Poles were sent to Treblinka I under German sentences, usually as a result of failure to deliver quotas or other violations of German occupation regulations. For Jews, transport to Treblinka I (as well as to the neighboring extermination camp) was a death sentence.
Approximately 300 Poles and 10,000 Jews died in the Treblinka I labor camp. Today, three hundred crosses stand on the site where thousands of Jews were executed, each commemorating a Polish victim of Treblinka I. And where are the 10,000 matzevot dedicated to the memory of the Jews murdered in the camp? Nowhere. The Jewish victims of the labor camp are simply carefully omitted from the museum's official narrative today.
Treblinka has no luck with memorials. On the site of the former railway station in Treblinka, where hundreds of thousands of Jews waited, suffocating in cattle cars, for their final transport into the camp, on the ramp, the Polish authorities, in the form of the Pilecki Institute, unveiled a monument to Jan Maletka in 2021. Maletka, according to representatives of the Polish state, was killed by the Germans while carrying water to dying Jews. Maletka, according to the official account, acted out of altruistic impulse, out of the goodness of his heart. However, we do not have even a shred of reliable historical information to confirm this bold thesis. On the other hand, there are many eyewitness accounts that Polish railway workers sold water to Jews dying of thirst—with the consent of Ukrainian and German guards—for large sums of money, valuables, and gold.
That's not all: work is underway on the construction of a new museum in Treblinka. The work is scheduled to be completed this year, and the main exhibition is to be unveiled in 2027, which, in museum language, is just around the corner. This also means that the main exhibition is probably already ready in its basic outline. Will it refer to the falsification of the history of Treblinka I, which is taking place under the patronage of the museum's management, just next door, behind the forest? What will this exhibition have to say about the attitude of the local population towards the Jews dying behind the camp's barbed wire? And how will it shed light on the participation of Poles in the liquidation of local ghettos? We have both been researching Treblinka for years and have been writing about it for a long time, but we have not heard a word about the planned museum or the main exhibition.
A “Wall of Names” is to be built next to the museum. The Treblinka Remembrance Foundation wants to engrave the names of hundreds of thousands of victims of the extermination camp on it. The whole idea is one big misunderstanding, because the Germans sent Polish Jews (who constituted the vast majority of Treblinka's victims!) to extermination camps without drawing up any lists of names for deportation. In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, lists of names of Jews deported in each convoy were indeed compiled. Given that few people escaped from foreign transports and with the lists of names in hand, historians can venture to compile a list of foreign victims of Treblinka. But this is not the case with Polish Jews! As far as they are concerned, we know roughly how many people were sent, where from and when, but even here it is impossible to be precise. In the absence of lists of names accompanying the deportations, we are not and will never be able to compile a reliable list of Treblinka victims. The list, which is soon to be found on the Wall of Names, contains the names of people who may have died in Treblinka, who may have died during liquidation operations in distant ghettos, those who escaped and died (often at the hands of Poles!) on the Aryan side, and other people who have nothing to do with Treblinka. If the authors of this initiative really wanted, as they claim, to commemorate the names of individual victims, they would simply refer to Yad Vashem's “Book of Victims,” which lists the names of 4.5 million victims of the Shoah. Instead of a wall full of mistakes, we would have a huge book to browse through, a copy of the one that can be viewed at Yad Vashem, which contains most of the known victims of the Holocaust, including the victims of Treblinka II.
What do the planned museum, the wall of names, the Maletka monument, the stones with the inscriptions “Jedwabne” and “Radziłów,” and the crosses filling the Treblinka I labor camp have in common? The common denominator is the distortion of historical truth, bending it to political needs. In the civilized world, changes in commemoration in the most sensitive and most sensitive places—from the point of view of memory—are preceded by years of open and widespread consultation. In Poland, successive invasions of memory in a place as dramatically painful as Treblinka are preceded by deafening silence, followed by politicians' declarations of yet another fait accompli! We would like to remind you that Treblinka is not the property of officials and a small coterie of their friends and acquaintances! The minister appointing a small group of experts pretends to conduct consultations, which should take place among a wide range of people and institutions dealing with the subject. He should not close himself off to their voices, giving them only to people of his own choosing.
Quite recently, the Minister of Culture appointed the Treblinka Council. The moral duty of this body (and the test of its legitimacy) is to immediately stop the former and upcoming examples of the “pseudo-memory offensive” discussed in our text.
Meanwhile, we stand powerless in the face of yet another memory blitz by the Polish state. Do we not have the right to demand transparency in memory policy? Does the memory of the victims not deserve, now, more than eighty years after the crime, seriousness, focus, and transparency of intent?
Prof. Jan Grabowski
Dr Katarzyna Grabowska
