In memory of my grandparents
The photo accompanying this article shows the memorial stone at the site of the Nazi extermination camp based in Treblinka, Poland.
It was one of over 40,000 death camps and incarceration centres purposely built to mass-murder or enslave millions of people during Hitler’s regime.
I drove to Treblinka in 1991. It was one of the most desolate, moving experiences of my life. It was dusk and I was there all alone.
I wanted to write ‘not another soul’.
But all around me I could feel hanging in the air and deep in the ground the souls of the estimated 900,000 innocent people, who had been methodically and efficiently slaughtered in the camp’s six gas chambers.
There was a sinister silence all around. This was a most evil, awful place, and always will be.
The Nazis, in an attempt to avoid responsibility for their crimes, hastily destroyed much of the camp as they retreated from the advance of the ‘liberating’ Russian Red Army.
𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗺𝗽, 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝗯𝗮𝗿𝗲, 𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗸, 𝗰𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝗱𝗱𝗹𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝗵𝘂𝗴𝗲, 𝗺𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗼𝗼𝗱, 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗵𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗲𝗱𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗸, 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗺𝘀.
I prayed for them all before driving away. All the souls, but especially my grandparents, who it had been understood from patchy family history, were murdered there.
As darkness began to fall, I got completely lost trying to navigate the road leading from the camp, in the middle of the never-ending dense woods, through which light could barely penetrate, and it seemed didn’t want to either.
There were no other cars on the road, no street lighting, no signs, no satnav. For a long while I thought I’d never find a way out of there, and if I did, I never, ever wanted to go back.
But at least I can live to say that.
The memorial stone at Treblinka pleads in more than one language: “Never again”
▪ MY GRANDPARENTS
Because of my family history, hearing the name ‘Treblinka’ always created a deep spasm in the pit of my stomach.
In recent years, however, I have learnt from new research that I am still checking out, that my grandparents – Bertold and Helena Danzig – were not sent to the Treblinka extermination camp.
As a result of meticulous documentation left behind by the Nazi regime, and carefully pieced together by compassionate researchers, I now understand they were sent by train to the Sobibór camp, in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Sobibór was an extermination camp, not a concentration camp. Its sole purpose was mass murder, almost exlusively of Jewish people.
According to a recently published database of victims, Bertold was despatched to Sobibór on Transport Ax, no. 709 from Terezín in Czechoslovakia on 9 May 1942.
Helena was despatched on Transport Ax, no. 710 on the same day.
The train journey itself would have been unbearable.
Sobibór had only just been made fully operational as a place of mass extermination in the middle of May 1942.
So, if the train record is correct, my grandparents would have been among the first to perish there.
Soon after they arrived at the camp – separated even before the train journey began – my grandparents would have been told that they were in a transit camp.
Quaint buildings at the front of the camp would have hidden its true, deceitful, notorious purpose.
Assembled with all the other condemned passengers on the railway siding, SS-Oberscharführer Hermann Michel made a speech to them.
He wore a white coat to give the impression he was a doctor.
Michel announced that they would be sent to work. But before this they would have to take baths and undergo disinfection, to prevent the spread of diseases.
We know this from the testimony given in the trials that followed the war.
The men and women were all separated. Everyone, including my grandparents, would be told to completely undress.
All the women had their hair unceremoniously shaven off with brutal and speedy efficiency.
Then, the train passengers of that day would be led through the “Tube” into chambers, where Bertold and Helena would have been gruesomely gassed.
In total, some 170,000 to 250,000 innocent people were murdered at the Sobibór death camp.
• Photo of Treblinka death camp adapted from a colour photo by Adrian Grycuk – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl
