The Treblinka Uprising: Resistance & Remembrance 80 Years Later

hello my name is Jeremy Collins the director of conferences and symposia here at the national World War II museums Jenny Craig Institute for the study of Warren democracy thank you for joining us for today's very important webinar that will cover the uprising at Treblinka today marks the 80th anniversary of that Uprising and we have three wonderful young scholars with us who will share their latest findings and thoughts leading the conversation will be my colleague and friend Dr Jason dossey Jason received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2013 and specializes in the history of the European left the impact of technology on Modern Life and the Holocaust he has co-edited along with Dr Gunter Bischoff a book on the life of Gunter Anders in his most recent article rethinking red Vienna at a moment of transition was just published in contemporary Austrian studies Jason joins us here at the Museum as our defense pow Mia accounting agency resident fellow in 2017 and became our research historian in 2019. as our research historian he works with our partnership with Arizona State University for our online World War II master's degree program he writes numerous articles and hosts numerous public programs including many webinars and has been involved in our travel programs so with that it's my pleasure to pass it over to Dr Jason dossey Jason Jeremy thank you very much let me welcome everyone to this webinar really this very special anniversary commemorating the Treblinka Uprising a story of resistance and Remembrance and just honored to have the chance to speak to a couple of not only colleagues but friends who are experts on trebelinka and really going to talk about this Camp it's place in the larger history of the Nazi Genocide and this really extraordinary case of resistance one of the major instances of resistance Jewish resistance European resistance however you want to approach it from the second world war in general so I'm going to introduce the two of them here and then we're going to get into a series of questions that I think will throw some light on the treblink uprising first is Jacob flaws who is an assistant teaching professor at Arizona State University I think many of you in the audience know that the museum has a very close partnership with Arizona State running a World War II online Master's program and World War II studies and that's actually how I got to meet Jacob and got to know him as through that partnership so he teaches In This World War II studies Masters program and I hope many of you will seek out information about that that program is based in the school of historical philosophical and religious studies at ASU he's also a faculty affiliate in the department of History the Center for Jewish studies and the malikian center for Russian Eurasian in Eastern European studies he earned his bachelor's degree at Buena Vista University a masters at Iowa State and PhD at the University of Colorado Boulder very excited to announce that Jacob's forthcoming book with the University of Nebraska press be published next year 2024 is entitled spaces of Treblinka retracing a death camp and the Book World chart contemporary experiences of Jewish polish German and Ukrainian Witnesses in order to reconstruct the overlapping spatial layers at once comprised the death camp also joined today delighted to say by Chad Gibbs who is an assistant professor of Jewish studies and director of the Zucker Goldberg Center for Holocaust studies at the College of Charleston just a wonderful City for those who haven't had the chance to visit Charleston yet Chad is a historian of the Holocaust anti-Semitism and War in society he is currently working on a book as well that analyzes geography gender and social networks in Jewish resistance at Treblinka he is also an oral historian and an Affiliated researcher at the USC dornside center for advanced genocide research and a scholar interviewer with the USC showa Foundation Jacob and Chad great to see you both welcome thank you thank you glad to be here uh and and to get to have this opportunity alongside Jacob this is really something we've been talking about for a matter of months and so great to see it come together so Chad and Jacob there's always a question with something this difficult when you're looking at the subject matter and let's just say it I think is often quite unfamiliar to American audiences Treblinka is a name that might some Americans might know but often don't know a lot about Auschwitz beer Canal tends to be the camp connected to the Nazi Genocide that most Americans know that in and of itself would be an interesting thing to know why it is claimed so much attention but here we're going to really get into some detail about Treblinka and why making the case obviously why Americans should know much more about it than they they they do and often what they even encounter when they see discussions of the Holocaust so with that said where to start Why not start with really the book that for many scholars who work on the Holocaust or the two of you um has been indispensable and that's yitzhaka Rod's belgets so be bored for blinka the operation Reinhardt death camps here's my uh old copy of it for those who are you know curious first published with Indiana University press in 1987 and then a revised and Expanded Edition came out in 2018 it's still the major study uh in English of these operation Reinhardt camps of which treblinko was was one of those so Chad we're going to start with you with this one beginning with a Rod's work so what I'd like to ask here is what do you think is important to know about a Rod's monograph and how do you think we should evaluate it now that it's more more than 35 years since it first appeared yeah um I think I'll start with a rod himself he's such was such an amazing human being um he's with us until recently unfortunately he's passed away now but he's a Survivor himself he's a leader at God vashem he's a brigadier general and the IDF um just an amazing life uh brilliant uh scholar and I think one of the more wowing moments of getting to work on Treblinka is that I think I've actually seen yitzhakarad's own handwriting and the margins of documents that Yad vashem um writing in Hebrew and taking little notes here and there I think only the archivist gets away with writing on the archival document so I think that's a rod that left that behind but um that first book 87 and now uh 2018 it really is it's this authoritative account of all three camps what did uh Nazi Germany want these camps to do how did they come about where do they fit into the showa um and what were their operations supposed to be like and how does Treblinka fit into that as if you want to say the third to open the most refined of the three um you can you can always see the design similarities between Belgium sobibor and Treblinka but Treblinka perhaps is the one that kind of gets as close to what they wanted the camps to to function like as as all three and I think arad's work being released again in 2018 um I had the opportunity to review the two of them together when that came out in 2018 and reading the both of them side by side it's it's clear that he's he's not needed to update the core research to main that sort of uh highest mountain in the field on these three works it's it's really that it's been re-situated in an evolving Holocaust historiography is put back into what do we think of the role of oxyon Reinhardt that's the name over all three of these camps um and then the core research is pretty much unchanged so that's where uh Jacob first and then me following after will uh will come into this is that um about 40 years later there's room for uh for new findings pretty much in a methodological and I also make the argument in a sources sense so I think that's that's where we where we pick up Iran thank you Chad I mean that really you know this notion of new findings and where where you build on a rod where you differ uh but no doubt he's always a reference point Jacob your thoughts on a Rod's book yeah Everything Chad said is relevant today and I think that's the really big thing for me is that word relevance I think it speaks to a Rod's methodology his groundbreaking approach to treating these three camps that it's still the work on the Reinhard camps on certainly Treblinka belzatz and sobibor I think for me when I approached Rod's work the thing that resonates is his sources still make an impact today he's looking at German perspective Jewish perspective and polish perspective he's interviewing the train station Master at Treblinka an outside witness that maybe would have been overlooked in the historiography up until you know 87 when it came out I think we also have to situate his original release of this book in 87 with the the rest of the the history that's going on at that point certainly in the United States we're still very much in the midst of the Cold War at that point and we have a American Centric you're a western-centric view of World War II and the Holocaust and show up and you know high up in that language is places like Bergen Belson and Dachau even Auschwitz to an extent but we have to remember the Reinhardt camps were all well behind the German or the Soviet sphere of influence after the start of the Cold War they were torn down before the end of the war unlike these other camps which the Allies were able to uh you know uncover relatively intact and so this is almost a chance for the world to first get introduced to some of these things on a very academic level I also like to pair this uh this book that our ad put out with Claude landsman showa which comes out about the same time that's this epic long nine hour long documentary of sorts just Masterpiece really where he's going into these areas he's looking at some of these camps as well and he's doing it from a perspective the that people are going to relate to in terms of video interviews with Witnesses he's walking around the sites that were there and I think that piques the interest and I arad's book coming out about the same time gives the scholarly approach so I think that one-two punch uh in the 80s the the mid to late 80s I think is kind of this eye-opening experience for a lot of people in the west who really picture the Holocaust as something far different than these three death camps and we'll talk more about you know how those look how those function differently than some of the other camps but the Western imagination I don't think really fully grasped the depth of kind of the darkest parts of the Holocaust yeah I just want to add on to that or kind of point out something that Jacob was saying in there um that part of the sources novelty of a rod is that he's a bit before the turn toward oral histories and listening to Jewish survivors early Holocaust historians including Jewish survivors themselves went straight to the German documents and thought of that as the most authoritative and maybe in a lot of cases only way to get at this history a rod probably because of his subject matter and what was even available to him he's willing to make that turn toward listening to the witness a lot earlier than some other historians and and definitely some other topics thank you for this uh fascinating perspective on the book I mean you both kind of pointed out that the book itself is the last decade of the Cold War and and so already things by 1987 are are starting to change there but will be dramatic uh implications for the opening up of Soviet archives you know later on but that Rod's work is right there in that and it was it's such an amazing book it's obviously for for our audience out there it's a very demanding book I mean he confronts some just horrifying subject matter but what you learned from him is is incredible and just to kind of reiterate what's been brought up already a rod himself had been a partisan during World War II a figure in in Jewish resistance activity in Eastern Europe he writes a memoir in fact about that several years before the book on the operation Reinhardt Camp so those are interested in a Rod's own life and activity during this what happens to family of his during the genocide his book The partisan will certainly be of interest to you chatted Jacob now that you've given us some framework for thinking about this major book and then how the two of you are going to build off of it I think the next thing we'd want to do for our audience is provide some orientation about operation Reinhardt this term that's in both editions of a Rod's book so when we save this term operation Reinhardt can we give an overview and then Jacob will start with you on this one an overview what this operation Axion Reinhardt or operation Reinhardt what this was and how we can relate it to something I think our audience is more familiar with the January 1942 vonze conference how can we bring these things together for them Jacob yeah thanks Jason uh so action Reinhardt is really the culmination from the German perspective of what what they have seen as actually I would argue final solutions to the Jewish problem as they would call it uh lowercase f lowercase s um a lot of you know the former intentionalist versus functionalist debate on the Holocaust the former saying it was Hitler's goal all along to exterminate Jews the latter saying that it the process evolved I think historians kind of agreed somewhere in the middle there that Hitler certainly is important to understand in terms of who the target was and why they were targeted but the actual way that this looked the uh shootings death camps and that was the functionalist aspect of this so if we go back to even 1939 with the invasion of Poland and then 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union you see the initial phase is concentration of the Jewish people and they put them into ghettos they assume that something else is going going to happen later down the road but for now that's part of the Nazi perspective is to get the Jews concentrated in large cities eventually hopefully from the Nazi perspective they wanted to remove them the initial goal wasn't to kill them at least from the functionalist perspective in fact they thought about sending them to Madagascar which had recently Fallen under German control after they took over France which Madagascar is a French Colony that plan to make Madagascar a giant Colony didn't really work out because the Germans weren't able to defeat the British the British still controlled the Seas so there was no way to send ships down to that area and then you get Barbarosa 1941 somewhere along the line we think either Himmler or probably Hitler himself makes an oral order Hitler speaks actually to several of these Einstein's group and uh commanders these squads these special groups that go out behind the Vermont on the heels of the invasion and instead of taking more Jews from the Soviet territories that they're now invading into custody and into these confinement into these these ghettos the decisions made to Simply shoot them and that's really the first phase of the final solution if you want to you know use that language where 1.5 to 2 million Jews and and others are rounded up and shot near their places of home and this is the experience of the Holocaust for a large chunk of people who are murdered there is is being killed in local Ravines ditches cemeteries places they would have been intimately familiar with near their homes thousands of mass shooting sites now after Barbarossa happens and and this mass shooting phase wraps up or at least gets gets moving there comes this shift with well now what do we do with the millions of Jews in the ghettos and this is where the Von say conference comes in uh we again don't have a written order we think that Hitler has made an oral order at some point uh Himmler certainly makes the intention known this is Hitler's decision and himmler's decision to find a more quote efficient way to exterminate the Jews that are remaining at Von say there's roughly 15 to 17 German officers uh the highest ranking probably Reinhard heydrich which is where the name operation Reinhardt comes from he's assassinated shortly after in Prague and they named the the death camp program Operation Reinhard after Reinhard heydrich Eichmann is also there and the goal of Von say is not necessarily to debate whether or not this needs to happen the goal of Von say is to figure out how it needs to happen again this is where the functionalist aspect comes in the shootings are no longer viable you have all these people in the ghettos near railway lines and so the decision that ultimately comes from this is to create three death camps and these are fact facilities where there is no work there is very very limited selection people are literally sent to these places to be killed this is not an Auschwitz where there's working camps there's so many sub camps these are to be places where simply people are sent to be murdered in stationary gas Chambers and again that's uh belgetz sobibor and Treblinka which are then started to to be built in 1942 right after the Bonsai conference thanks for that Chad would you like to elaborate no that was all excellent I think I would only throw in because it might interest American audiences that uh Von say is briefly delayed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor so by the time this happens it's going the same direction that Jacob was there um I I believe that the scholarships currently kind of come to an agreement on the idea that Von say is a disseminate whose job is what sort of meeting it's not a meeting to decide whether or not they're going to build gas Chambers and and murder Jews at set Place camps instead of those mass shooting sites so it's more of a now we're at war with the whole world of kind of all gloves are off we can take off after this perceived chosen Jewish enemy that they think goes along with their uh Western and uh Eastern communist animes and um kind of just go straight at what they have kind of probably for some time foreseen depending on where you come down on that debate that Jacob was talking about um but that uh that last piece of the puzzle uh the Pearl Harbor attack in the United States coming into the war um just escalates things beyond anything that had been seen to that point and Jason if I could just one more Point uh that Chad actually reminds me of you know we we do have one set of documents that survived this meeting they were supposed to all have been destroyed one of the telling things is I believe it was eichmann's uh list uh that he made they are not just planning for the murder of Jews in the territories that the Nazis hold by 1940 142. in this list they they cite 11 million is the number that they give and they've accounted for English uh English Jews you know in the United Kingdom they've accounted for Portuguese Jews which of course is not in it is not part of the Nazi Universe they have actually taken into consideration and that's how dark I think this this operation Reinhardt is like like Chad said this isn't something that is it's a foregone conclusion that this is going to be the murder of Jews and this this the really twisted part they're accounting for countries they haven't even taken over yet assuming they will get those countries under their control and have to murder their juice so this is really that's where Reinhard comes in and that that's the dark goal of these camps is to murder not just the Jews that they've already taken but Jews that they you know it's technically worldwide yeah well the two of you have really condensed an incredibly complicated and atrocity-laden history already noting there are over a million Soviet Jews have been murdered by late 1941 there'll be other sweeps by on-site's group and later and pointing out that by this point with the U.S coming into the War Nazi Germany declaring war on the U.S December 11th that the Nazi regime sees itself in a global struggle to the death with enemies that are dominated U.S Britain and the Soviet Union by Jews and that's that's a claim for Hitler Goebbels heydrich Himmler eichma Etc you could just keep adding the list of these people that simply uh there's no room for even critical thought on that even Joseph Stalin is somehow a Jewish puppet in this uh world view and so it's I think important for the audience to remember you have this notion of a global struggle now by the end of 4142 and then how this is playing out quite locally in Poland with these camps created in what the Germans will call the General government or government General depending on how people render it this area of occupied poles under at least officially a civilian Administration and yet the SS are running these camps within that belgians so before Treblinka and where the are going to murder well over one and a half million people before it's over so that's that's really great I think in terms of showing us how where we're at giving us a framework for thinking about this so let's talk about Treblinka the third I think Chad's already noted that the third and final of these camps so if we can use the term operations we're here talk saying mass murder that really begins at Treblinka in July 1942. so some six months after the vonzi conference and so Chad back to you on on this one first could the two of you describe where we're talking about when we say Treblinka how this Camp whether you want to call it a death camp an extermination camp a killing Center there's obviously real debate uh not only just academic debate but kind of ethical debate about what's the what's the the right term the kind of moral term to use about these camps where so many people perish but how it was set up and administered and what would you want us to know about the perpetrators that are Staffing the camp so Chad please I think one more thing about Axion Reinhardt gives us the place to begin this answer uh and that's to say that at the we we talked about how the the meeting is to disseminate that this is going to happen now it's just to tell everyone at that table what their role in it will be it seems like probably one uh one change might have been made around that table depending on your interpretation um that the leadership Nazi German leadership of that General government of occupied Poland raises its hand at that table and says this should begin in Poland we have the largest Jewish population seems that that is taken on board and then oxio and Reinhard as the outcome of that meeting is directed right at occupied Poland so where those three camps pop up then just is a matter of Polish rail geography population centers and trying to find some version of you know this jacob I think should talk about this some more but that that so-called secrecy of keeping these places out in the countryside secrecy is really a total misnomer but I'll set that aside then when you've decided where these places are going to be you know what they are going to do um who's going to operate them becomes a matter of going back to kind of the Nazi tool chest of what they had already done to their chosen enemies uh so they've already invented the idea of the of the gas chamber they did that at the euthanasia sites uh where they uh took the lives of mentally and physically disabled Germans and others uh polls as well um but they have because of that program which many uh listeners might know as the T4 program uh they have a trained Cadre of um SS men well men that will become SS uh who know how to operate these Chambers and they think will be the right people to lead these camps up to this point in their lives they've been medical orderlies or some form of Staff around these uh euthanasia sites uh and those individuals uh 90 plus of them are sent East to be the main German Cadre at these three camps all three of them are run on a very small amounts of German guards and then mostly they have what the sources will either recall is trevniki or Ukrainian guards but um so you'd have 30 or so uh German SS guards those would be the individuals who came from the T4 program the euthanasia sites and they would lead that most of them hold NCO or non-commissioned officer sergeants type ranks and Lead uh around 120 at treblinko these numbers will go up and down over time um but what was called the travniki guards or the Ukrainian guards those individuals are taken from POW camps where Nazi Germany had captured a great deal of the members of the Red Army and they offer them the this sort of choice you can come into German service or stay in this POW Camp which might well mean your death as 3 million uh Soviet pows die in German captivity so um we could think all day long about their levels of anti-Semitism however uh they were definitely anti-semitic in their own right but they also just make that decision that leaving that POW Camp is better than staying in it so those are your individuals that run it kind of where it comes from um maybe Jacob wants to take over on like the operations day to day how it functions thank you Chad um so you know that's an excellent overview of who is who is running this who's put in charge I think you know the other thing that Chad mentioned was this idea of secrecy the location selection of the three Reinhardt camps is very important when uh examining why the Germans did this why they did what they did at the end of the day they are the ones who created these camps and so we do have to kind of try to understand that dark logic behind why they did so to or to to figure out you know what what made them work how they were designed the way that they were the the goal is really twofold here Chad mentioned you know one of the big ones is it needs to be near a major Railway line they know they have a large numbers of Jewish populations in the ghettos they know that most of those ghettos are on major in major cities near major railway lines and so they want to find a place that is both accessible but also isolated at least from their perspective and so Treblinka is decided to be right near the the critical Junction Town railway town of malkinia gorna which is about halfway between bialystock and Warsaw and essentially that is so Warsaw course the biggest you know Jewish ghetto in in all of of Europe at this point with over 400 000 uh Jews being confined there and biowe stock also has a large population but they like Mount Kenya because it's not a very heavily populated town they have a labor camp there for polls who are not meeting German quotas because the polls are also under the thumb of the Germans and those polls are sent to the work camp at Treblinka which later becomes treblinka1 it's located at a gravel Quarry about eight kilometers from Mount Kenya near the town of Treblinka of the same name and this there's about 700 to a thousand polls at this Treblinka one Camp since 1939 1940 who are put in charge of uh making you know mining the gravel from this area they're the ones who are then requisitioned and forced to build Treblinka to what in in what the Nazis feels out in the middle of nowhere they see this as an isolated space they feel like that's important to them and the reason that's important to them we have to look further back into the evolution of kind of what's going on here with the Holocaust you know the Nazis have learned two major lessons along the course of implementing their racial policies the first was learned on crystal knocked this idea that the German people their reaction to the islands in the streets of November of 1938 their reaction to the violence as German people are assaulting Jews and destroying synagogues and breaking Windows is not that the Germans shouldn't do this to the Jews their reaction is this is publicly disorder this is something we don't want to see this makes us look bad so the Germans in their mind the Nazi leaders say okay the German people didn't protest that were targeting Jews they just don't want to see it they don't want to get the sense that this is disorder and you see this with T4 after World War II starts in September of 1940 or 1939 as Chad mentioned the T4 program they organized six killing sites for the mentally and physically disabled that they start killing by the tens of thousands and they put these six sites in various places throughout the German reichs many of them are in Austria but that's been a next they actually get protests for those too but again here the the protests for from the German people is not that they shouldn't be doing this at least for the most part they do get some of that but the main protests that make the Nazis really in that program is the Germans in these towns don't want to smell it they don't want to hear it they don't want to see it and so by 1942 by Reinhardt that's the decision to locate these camps and what they feel is isolated but also is on the frontiers of Poland this is very much supposed to be part of the labens realm of the German Third Reich and so the the Nazis assume that this is okay by the German people the vast majority of them have not complained that this is done against Jews or people with disabilities their complaint has simply been that they do not want to see it hear it or smell it and so their location here in the middle of the general government in Poland near the what had been the border with the Soviet Union up until 1941 that is very very specific they don't care as much if the polls see it hear it or smell it and they certainly do we know that the camps you know create a lot of smoke and smells and sensory witnessing but they're not as concerned because the polls are second-class citizens in the German mindset so that's really the the idea behind where to locate the camps and how it fits into Nazi logic great thank you for for the I mean that really does clarify I think for for all of us about the the Locale of mass death in this case it is remote it's it's away from major population centers but it's accessible by Rail and the Warsaw Ghetto is Jacob and all is going to be crucial especially for the kind of early phase of for blankets so why don't we shift now to talking about the the Jewish experience at Treblinka we've we will obviously have plenty more opportunity to to talk about Nazi perpetrators and or Ukrainian perpetrators when we get into the the uprising but from where can we say that you know from where were Jews deported to Treblinka and what happened to them once they arrived at the camp both of you point out there was definitely resistance prior to August 2nd 1943 that's obviously our Focus here today but can you give us some insight into these pre-uprising acts of resistance at Treblinka yeah Chad would you like to feel this one sure um so I think I could talk about how the Jewish experience begins and that is by getting off the train I'll talk about a little bit of like how this Camp operates to to get a basis for that experience so let's say it's an average day at treblinko where X transports are arriving those trains could be 60 cars long 60 bucks cars long and they'll break it into three sections because the the railroad siding inside of trepinka 2 inside of the extermination camp can take 20 cars at a time by backing it up that line and closing the gate in front of the locomotive so they'll break it down they'll do that three times individuals be forced off that train into an arrival Plaza always making people go as fast as as they possibly can this is a point where I could say maybe it would be helpful for the audience to throw up that 1942 map um and as they're pushing people into that arrival area um people are made to to undress there um men and women are separated uh sources kind of vary on um what happens next after that separation of the Sexes and I think that partially that's that that uh that experience changes over time but people are entering along that 14 labeled track then they're pushed into uh through the gate labeled 16 their uh men are made to undress Outdoors where it says 18 women indoors where it says 20 and then they are pushed up this uh this tube here I say the word two because it's sometimes referred to in German as the schlach uh and then also in their uh terrible sense of humor is the hymn of strassa the road to heaven both of those appear in the sources but um it doesn't take very long uh terribly unfortunately what especially once uh if you want to pop up the 1943 map uh once they uh enlarge the Gat and make a new gas chamber um 6 000 or more human beings can be murdered and their bodies disposed of by lunchtime if they've arrived in the morning um one of the things we learned from Gita sereni's book is in uh the former commandant of of treblinka's own words foreign words that they would be done by that that work by lunchtime he actually tells her uh in one of their interviews so that that's how it works like how the how Jews experience this um and where resistance can happen uh is really a conversation to start with right from now on this later map from like the number 25 and 27. um so that's this relabeled reception area of the same light so some Jews arriving at Treblinka do engage in physical resistance immediately on stepping off the train um at least one guard is stabbed to death by a Jew stepping off a train um that guard's name we know for sure it's probably that the Jew who uh who killed that man was named Maya Berliner but that's that's a difficult to to ascertain for certain uh it's likely however so there that sort of thing takes place they attempted a couple of different times to unload trains at night uh it seems that there were some Mass attempts at resistance when they attempted to unload trains at night so they stopped doing that sort of thing um but that's you know people immediately go to the idea of armed or physical resistance what also goes on I think that's necessary to talk about um especially in this arrival area is how Jews resist in more subtle yet uh incredibly important ways so one of the ways that I think they put together their resistance strategy was by taking control of who gets brought into the camp alive one of the big ways that Treblinka and the other Axion Reinhard camps differ from an Auschwitz is there's no big set piece selection of who's capable of work and who's not here um if a train of six thousand people arrives at Treblinka it would be pretty common for all six thousand of those people to be murdered but some days there are openings in the workforce created by one terrible circumstance or another and um it seems that Jews Act actually standing on the working at the reception area are able to have some influence in who replaces those those people so that becomes a way to pick individuals you trust and if you already trust them then you can slap them into a growing resistance conspiracy um and you know not have to worry about in this terrible place of extremis trying to figure out whether or not you can trust this new person you pick somebody you already know um and then you know it's worth a couple of seconds at least to talk about spiritual resistance uh or just remaining who you were if Nazi Germany intends to murder you for being Jewish and you steadfastly remain so to your final moment that is also a resistance that deserves to be to be thought of I think um so we have stories of uh rabbis getting off the trains with their congregations and um saying the Shema Israel uh on their way to the gas chamber because as time goes on more and more Jews do understand full well what arrival at chablinka is that's regardless of the fact that by the time that camp looks like this in 1943 they've already put uh they've they've they've made it look like a train station and tried to um lull people into a false sense of security all the way up to the last moments but um as time goes on through as you know especially escapees returning to um the ghettos and other places in Europe more and more Jews do know what transport to treblanca means and that gives them at least the opportunity to decide if they're going to pray in their last moments or they're going to attempt to take off after a guard in their last moments how they're going to live out that and um if they have any choice at all it's it's comes down to at least having the information that allows you to make a choice so that's I think how things change over time how that the arrival um works for people um for for most of the 900 plus thousand people who are murdered at Treblinka uh it's over in a couple of hours it's a terribly efficient place it's uh it's horrendous um uh anyway I'd ask Jacob if he's also read about this but I've heard that the new gas Chambers are so efficient that they never even use the five Chambers on the opposite side of the hallway so if you look at Building 35 here in this map there are five Chambers on each side of a central hallway and this place is so able to do what the Nazis wanted to do that it comes down to and uh that they only ever used half of it but I think that's where I would stop um just that initial how arrival in the Jewish experience works for the the mass of of victims that we don't really have the ability to hear their stories um I'm sure that the both of us will talk about um experiences of those who lived inside the camp going on Chad thank you that was that's just utterly chilling detail and shows something about the the entire Nazi mindset the the focus on this level of detail of organization of deception to tried to at least prevent people or at least render them passive even when they might know what's happening because you've already pointed out many people are not positive prior to August 1943 there are various ways they do resist even up to and just preserving their own sense of of Jewish identity but you can see how monstrous a system this is here uh and and designed for efficiently murdering people by the thousands every day Jacob what would you like to to add to this yeah I think Chad did an excellent job of giving the layout of Treblinka what the Jewish experience was like what the camp was meant to do I may just add a few points to kind of help paint the larger picture here and it is a horrible picture this is not something that is you know fun to talk about by any stretch right this is this is the worst of the worst when it comes to treblanca some of the things that the Jews had to experience in their final moments or even the ones who were kept alive for a few weeks before also being killed are some of the worst things I've ever encountered in terms of of research I I've made decisions not to include things because they're just too too horrific which is to a larger Point here there are some Jews kept alive at treblenko you know we mentioned earlier there are no selections here and that's true for probably most of the transports as Chad mentioned there are you know it's not uncommon for transports of five six thousand to all go into the gas Chambers the Germans though Chad also mentioned that there's only about 30 at Treblinka and then there's you know over a hundred probably of these Ukrainian guards that's that's not a lot of people to run a camp where you're murdering five to six thousand people at a time and so the Germans certainly don't want to do this work uh if you want to pull that map back up um I can make a few pointers there but the the Germans want the Jews to do this work to stay alive they certainly don't want to get their hands dirty if they can avoid it but you'll notice the death camp in the living Camp there's a large green space between it and it looks fairly close on this map but in terms of geography and layout of this Camp that's as far away humanly possible as the the gas Chambers and the death pits over there where they're burying people and later burning people if you go all the way to this far corner here on the uh lower left hand side that's where the commandant's house is he is removing himself physically as far away as possible from this horrific killing that's going on he even wants to remove himself and that doesn't absolve them of any guilt certainly but it shows you their mindset that they don't want to do the the horrific tasks of this killing process and that's where you get juice being kept alive it's roughly between 700 and a thousand at any given time they work in different areas uh by far I would say the most horrific is the ones who are working in the actual death camp area the extermination area they're doing things like pulling Jews out of the gas Chambers they're dragging them to the graves and then later when the decision is made to burn the bodies they're doing that work which is is horrifying work they also are working in the reception area they're offloading train games and in fact if we could move forward there's a villenberg map that I'd like to show um thank you so if you actually notice this this is drawn by a Survivor Samuel villenberg who is one of the few survivors that we have of Treblinka and it shows very well kind of what Chad was describing here in the foreground you have the train arriving and you'll notice there are individual standing kind of directing the large groups of people into the uh undressing Barracks there and those are the Jews that are working in the reception area these are Jews whose right to live at Treblinka according to the Germans is that they are performing the functions of the camp they're tasked with trying to keep this orderly but in doing so they can in enact some aspects of resistance and to put this into a larger perspective the question that I think a lot of people sometimes have the misnomer is that Jews went like sheep to the slaughter right that this was the the Nazis goal that they were going to eliminate the Jews and these efficient death factories and so the question is well why did they let this happen to them and I think that's that's an incorrect question and I part of the reason why is the Jews that are being sent here really have the the deck stacked against them in Warsaw they're being starved to death they're dying in large numbers of disease in the streets freezing and they are told in July of 1942 that this is going to be a resettlement that they're being evacuated to the east for work I think you know I might even mention the the aspect of euphemisms is very important all the way back from Vons a conference they they never used the term killing they use these euphemisms like evacuation the Jews are told to bring luggage with them initially they they're given bread sometimes Jam to go on these these trains and within the first six to eight weeks over two hundred thousand uh by the first three months 300 000 Jews are sent from Warsaw to Treblinka that is a massive number of people in a very short period of time and it takes a while for word to get back about what Treblinka actually is if you look at the map here you can probably see the train station there there's a fake fake clock painted on it there are arrows pointing to Warsaw and biawi stock it's not called Treblinka it's called obermaidon which is this name that people show up and say oh this probably is a Transit Camp there are windows for Ticket takers in the train station the Nazis have gone to some lengths to try to make this appear that the euphemisms are correct in fact as they're being ushered into this undressing Barracks here they're told to not only undress but here's a ticket to get your clothes back make sure you tie your shoes together so you don't have you don't lose one and you just get one back on the other end and so so everything is done to ensure that this is part of this and so really you know once word finally gets back you have more and more resistance but the logical thing in the ghetto is when these disheveled survivors who maybe somehow escaped treblinker jumped off a train come back and say don't get on the trains it's going to a death camp the logical thing is to not believe that the Jews in the ghetto and most rational people at the time would have assumed well we're going to be kept alive for work why would the Nazis just kill us if at least we could work for the Third Reich why wouldn't they put us uh to work we know in World War One some of the horrific rumors coming out about the Germans proved to be inaccurate and so everything is really working against the the Jews finding out about what's actually happening here and being able to actively resist until it's you know already the speed of this process is so horrific that by the time the the Jews actually start to accept this is what's going on uh you know many of them have already been murdered and I would say too that as that happens you have more and more instances of active resistance not at the camp per se um but you know along the train tracks coming along people are jumping out of trains all along the the railway corridors that lead to Treblinka and that becomes so prevalent the Nazis have to start stationing guards on on the trains to try to prevent these escapes and you have many people getting murdered as they're jumping out of cars so the other thing I just want to point out about this map real quick is this this deception is something the Nazis are really putting a lot of effort into they even have flowers around the gas chambers that the original gas Chambers disguised as a Hebrew Temple and this is all to reiterate this ruse that this is a bath house this is a you know it's that ironic German sense of of kind of Macabre mindset here but underneath all of that you also have the very real understanding that if people are really paying attention you can see what's going on here is not probably what a resettlement camp would look like or Transit Camp would look like so the big pile of stuff that you see behind the train shed behind the undressing Barracks that's actually clothes and shoes and belongings and that some sometimes testimony say that's upwards of 50 to 60 feet high at some points because you think about the speed of 300 000 people bringing their belongings and the Germans encouraged this they want to steal those belongings that sticks up above the fences the the trains the people who have a view outside of the Barb barbed wire windows can see those massive piles of clothes and you know you can make two assumptions and you see Jews being very rational about this as they're showing up some say that's not good what happened to the people wearing those but you also see other conversations in these cattle cars as they're rolling up that oh that's going to be our work we have to get to work on this big pile of clothes sorting it for the third Rag and so you can kind of see that you know resistance is one of those things that it's very much an individual uh on an individual level it's hard to make blanket statements and people simply Staying Alive at Treblinka is a challenge well this has just been an extraordinary amount of of detail and I think now I think our audience really grasp something about the enormity of even attempting to really fight back against the system this totalitarian this murderous but nonetheless they did and so we come to it now to one of the most extraordinary days in the entire history of World War II in the Holocaust the Treblinka Uprising of August 2nd 1943 just watching our time we're now kind of down to around 25 or so minutes so this question and we'll start Jacob with you with this one if we could be brief on this one so we can really kind of lay out what actually happened during the uprising what do we need to know about key figures involved in preparing this revolt and what kind of plan or what can we say about a plan as such behind this action so Jacob and then Chad with this one yeah certainly so at your blinka like we talked about with the map there are certain Jews who are kept alive from the German perspective uh to run partial portions of the the camp and these are not homogeneous not homogeneous group they are broken up and uh delineated by their tasks so you have a group that works in the extermination uh part of the camp we could pull that map the 1943 map up if that might help uh they by 1943 are confined to that space they are not to leave that space and essentially that is where they are kept for the entirety of their stay and it's important to note too that these work Jews at Treblinka are also what the Nazis called rotated out with some frequency they're murdered especially early on every three to four weeks and the reason is they want the Nazis want to try to keep this a secret and that is where you get some more selections and transports that arrive the Nazis need to replace these work Jews and so these Jews by 1943 whether they worked solely in the death camp or the Jews who work in the reception area or another group called the whole feuden which are the court Jews these people are the ones who are able to Traverse the different spaces they're the ones with special skills uh yankovnik who's a carpenter is one example he's able to one of the few who's allowed to move through different parts of the camp and he's kept alive but these Jews by 1943 start to understand that the longest living among them are the ones who've been able to make themselves useful within this system and if they don't do that they're going to be killed themselves and so even life at Treblinka is not really life these Jews have to work amongst the death camp they have to work amongst the bodies of the people that they may know maybe family members and they know that they are going to be killed as well so by 1943 the transport slowing down and there is this real sense that there needs to be some type of resistance if they're not simply going to be killed as well it's it's a kind of a human instinct in some regard but essentially you have different plans that start to be hashed a guy named goluski is one of the key members here you also have yankovnik who's able to communicate this message between the different areas because again planning uh in the reception area or planning in the living camp area can't always be communicated across to the death camp workers and they're going to be important for any type of Revolt aspect and so people like the uncle vernek who's able to move throughout some of these spaces on his Carpenter duties is able to spread some of these messages and I think it's really also important to pair this up with what's going on in Warsaw because that is where a lot of these Jews come from and in Warsaw you have the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April of 1943 where knowing that treblink is at the end of the road here the Jews in the ghetto that are still in the ghetto fight back they don't get on the trains one day they've been stockpiling weapons they've been smuggling pieces of gunpowder from the different working units that they've been on and they fight off the Germans for about a month they actually kill around 300 German uh military men who are trying to come in to root them out now they ultimately the ghetto's burned down six to seven thousand are killed the other forty thousand are sent here to Treblinka or other camps actually many of them are sent off to maidonic because uh there's an instance where someone tries to smuggle their grenade into Treblinka and then the Germans come to the conclusion that we probably shouldn't send the same people who are resisting Us in Warsaw to Treblinka or lest it happen here but the the workers the Jewish workers at Treblinka they use that they say well this is clearly something that the Germans don't want they don't want us to resist and they start to figure out well how are we so plans are really afoot probably earlier than this but at least for sure by March or April 1943 that there needs to be some type of Revolt they set the date for various points they actually make a copy of the key to there's an Armory on site here in the SS part of this camp where the Germans keep their weaponry and these hot futon actually make a a key a a spare key to be able to break into that and they start to collect weapons they start to stash a grenade here like I said the one person actually brings a grenade from the Warsaw Ghetto onto the trains it's also important to know that some Jews that are kept alive here are the working Jews are part of the uh the Vault Commando which is the group that goes around collecting new branches because the outer tree line here if you look at the the map there's an open field and there's actually an outer fence that outer fence is barbed wire it's not electrified but they keep it interspersed with pine branches so that no one can see in from the outside but those die pretty quick and so there's literally a group kept alive whose job it is to go out into the forests around treblink into the fields collect new Pine branches and basically replace the dead ones with the living ones and that's you know I think we could have another conversation about how important secrecy is to the Germans that they want to keep Jews alive to make this happen but they also start trading with the local polls there and the Ukrainian guards can be brought they're the guards that are out watching these you know 10 15 20 Jews who are out collecting tree branches and we actually know that they are able to get different products from these these poles in the tray they're able to get money they're able to get you know we think weapons actually a few of the weapons that they get are from this interaction they certainly are able to get food and different things as well and so all of these things start to come together and you know they actually set a date June 15th I believe 1943. and date has to get moved it does a couple of times for various reasons throughout the camp but they know that they need to do something and at this point I'll turn it over to Chad to give you his expertise on on this as well yeah sure that all of so much amazing points in there if we could jump to the villenberg map I'm going to show you something that uh Jacob and I both come to in our own writing and research on this that sort of Unites us we came at this not knowing that we were both thinking about it at the same time this is Samuel villenberg a Jewish survivor of the one the living Camp side of treblanca his work was not in the area that contained the gas Chambers and the burial pits or the pyres where bodies were burned later so he was not allowed in that side of Treblinka and if we look at this map that he draws here map slash drawing the only things that he draws in Camp 2 or that death camp side of the camp are things that he could see over the berm you see here a fence and then a sand berm going along behind that giant pile of clothing he draws the excavator you can see the arm of that above the berm so he knows that's there he draws um guard Tower because he can see that above the berm so he knows that's there and then the rest of it tabula rasa but if we're looking at the 1943 map we know what is back there and it's not that there's no fence that there's nothing he draws a blank space where he can't fill in the rest of the details and this is part of that where how we both come at this research this spatial problem of putting together resistance at Treblinka so if you're going to have a Revolt that includes everyone you need to network them together and that network has to be a network that can actually gain access to space it has to have people involved that are on both sides of that firm that know how it works on both sides of that berm it has to have those whole food and those Court Jews are more privileged or able to move prisoners involved has to have everybody working together on the same page about this resistance and that's something that I try to focus in on uh quite a bit in my own manuscript is how do they pull these people together and how is pulling those people together a a question of gaining access to this whole terrible place because the Nazis would allow a person to be alive where they sleep and where they work and in between those two places but if you're found outside of that you are constituting a threat you don't just get to go walking around never is their ability to just be outside of where you're supposed to be so we have to instead look at well if object a got between points a b and c who did that carrying what is the network that can bring those three points together uh and that's how I've looked at putting together resistance in this place and golovsky or galusky whichever way you want to say it is one of those people who's important to to this whole thing he's the Jewish Camp Elder that's a Lago Alta says the German term or Camp Elder means the highest ranking basically Jewish prisoner inside the camp and he's in on the resistance you might have heard it you know listeners may hear about uh how terrible capos are thought of as in in much of a holocaust history what I think inside Treblinka is that that some of them are not people that were involved some of them are uh even uh more aligned with the Nazis than they are Jews but the involvement of Jewish leaders in the Revolt is pretty darn heavy here so um golevsky that highest ranking prisoner he's involved in the resistance uh cello block is a another name that comes up as a a prisoner leader who's also part of resistance of course you have bianchoviernik who Jacob talked about who's the construction Foreman at treblinko so he's a you know you could use the word Capo with him if you wanted to but he's also part of resistance and a major carrier of information between those two deeply separate uh points in the camp this which again goes to that uh that so-called secrecy Thing Once a Jew is in Camp too the the part of Treblinka that uh where the gas Chambers are the strong rule is that unless you're yonkovirnik you can never go back to Camp one you are stuck there for good and virnik's skills as a construction worker uh are the thing that causes the Nazis to break their their own rule on that there's some also some other amazing ways that they communicate between the two camps I think one of my absolute favorites that just shows you how brilliant people could be is they would write little messages and Yiddish on the side of a cigarette and toss it over the berm um Germans can't read Yiddish it's written in Hebrew characters it's very Germanic language but if you can't read Hebrew characters it's completely incomprehensible to you so you can write in Yiddish on the side of a cigarette all you want and throw that they also um changed Yiddish uh the Yiddish working songs you might even think hearken back to uh uh enslave people's songs in the United States on the same way communicating messages between each other in song and making the subtleties of song uh cover up the ability to communicate back and forth over that berm so uh Jacob talk briefly about them getting a hold of the key part of that was uh in my work I think it's because lager Alta golevsky Alfred golevsky uh helps Jews get the ability to work around that Armory we go back to the 1943 map I'll point out where that Armory is uh that is uh way down at the bottom and toward the left here there's a number seven there's construction going on in front of that Armory on the day of the Revolt these green lines in front of it are actually like decorative flower planters you have to just suspend disbelief and believe that even in a terrible place like this the Nazis would attempt to beautify their living area and in the process of attempting to beautify their living area in the eye of hell they put Jews on work details in front of that very Armory and they've already got a key which the story of how they get that key is absolutely amazing but to keep things in some way brief and get toward this whole Rebellion on the day of the Revolt they've already got their key they have Jews with construction carts and other tools and impedimentia around that Armory so it kind of distracts it provides the ability to have a good deal of personnel there without anyone questioning the fact they're there and weapons are spirited out using that key on the day of the revolt and through those networks that gain access to geography as we both talk about they are moved into different positions in the camp and I think I'll stop at the point where when does the Revolt begin and how things sort of fall apart but stay together and let Jacob pick up on that one this is the extremely helpful so we're now here right on the day of August 2nd 1943. so Jacob is if Chad's already given you a cue if you want to to begin if we can give an overview for the audience about about the Revolt what actually happened on August 2nd yeah so I think you know it's important to note the incredible amount of you know courage almost feels like a disservice to say that word but the acceptance that this is likely going to mean death uh the the Jewish workers here that are working together very much collaboratively and secretly themselves like Chad mentioned with writing the messages and languages only they can understand um but also being very very uh you know attuned to keeping the secret they fully expect to not make they may well not make it out of this and they they have to come to terms with that in fact there's uh there's one uh gentleman who is actually caught ahead of time and instead of revealing the plans and and because he knows he's going to be tortured this is I believe in April or in May 1943 he actually takes a vial of poison and and and takes his own life because he's in on the conspiracy he knows what happens to people who are um who are trying to revolt uh the the person that Chad mentioned earlier who actually kills a German guard is tortured horrifically before he's killed in front of everyone and so they have to accept that this is is going to happen um but getting to August 2nd so on that day it is a Monday it is the day after um a Sundays are usually pretty slow so they know it's going to be a slow day they set the time of the Revolt for a certain point in the afternoon after they've done their morning duties the heat of the August days here in this part of Poland the Germans like to get everything done by about noon and so the the camp uh the living Jews take advantage of that they set the the plan for I think it's four or four Thirty in the afternoon and the idea is that at that point they will try to set everything on fire they will try to take their weapons and fight back and they're aided in this by the fact that after the work is done for the day Fran stongle who's the the camp commandant as well as several other high-ranking SS men at the camp and several Ukrainian guards go down to the book river which is nearby to take a a break you know sunbathe you know take a bath in the in the river to get away from the Heat and the Revolt itself actually doesn't go as planned at all in fact it's launched at least half an hour early when several of the Jews who are carrying Cash for Life outside the camp they know they're going to have to either take out the main entrance or if not they're going to have to try to fight their way through the barbed wire fences to get out and again there are watch Towers here with Ukrainian guards and machine guns they know this is going to be a fight but they have planned for Life afterwards you know they know that the local polish population may or may not help them but they know that the money is going to help they might be able to use that to bribe Ukrainian guards to look away in fact we know Ukrainian guards try to escape trelinka as well to get away from it and they're caught in in the trying to make this Revolt happen early on with that money on them and so they immediately launched the Revolt at that point and it's really kind of this chaotic moment um it's it's certainly the planning has gone on for months and that there's a general strategy but the actual fuse that lights this off is really a spark that um you know I think shows how they're willing to take advantage of any situation that they get Chad I'll toss it yeah one thing that we probably won't get into for for time is how many individuals involved in this preparation of a Revolt had some form of military experience and and while I would absolutely agree with with Jacob about the um you know courage not even being a good enough word for what's going on here um one of the things that we can also say is that if anything the Revolt was a bit over planned uh what takes place at sobibor is uh if you know people may be familiar with that Revolt perhaps also because of the more recent movie um that portrays it you know this is a Revolt that relies on bushwack tactics one guard here one guard there kill an individual when he comes in to a building um quietly take out a mass of the Guard staff and then go into revolt treblinka's planners seem to have much bigger eyes than than that sort of plan and they want to take on guards in a in a larger you might even almost say set piece battle um and that Pro and the problem that comes down there is that when two individuals are caught with the cash that uh Jacob talked about they're starting to be marched over to an area of execution prisoners decided very emotional decision um that no one else was going to die that day until you know the actual Revolt itself and they took a shot at the guard who was leading those two individuals to to kill them for having cash on them that set off the Revolt we could you know we can look at sources all day long it's going to be either a half an hour or an hour or so it's early whatever it comes down to this so it's such a chaotic moment that everybody who recalls it recalls it a little bit differently um but it's it regardless it's early and that means that not everybody is in the position they were supposed to be not everybody has come and pick up the weapon that they were supposed to have and instead of this being you know that soapy board type Revolt of get one guard at a time when it comes apart like that it becomes uh less of some sort of organized battle plan and becomes then uh absolute chaos but absolute chaos also works uh and there are at least there had been a an epidemic in the prisoner population before the Revolt so we don't exactly know how many people were probably Left Alive on that day but let's say for argument's sake 600 we're in the camp on the day that the Revolt happens it appears that 300 of them get out of the camp on that day uh 200 are probably killed in the process of the Revolt happening it is a met it's it's terrible people are running everywhere uh the Germans are still far better arms than even the the Jews who have captured some arms from them and that huge number of individuals killed on in the process of the revolt and German sources uh that are still you know of course in the camp at the end of the day say that somewhere around 100 work Jews remained in the camp after the Revolt so you've got 300 attempting their their escape outside the camp perhaps 200 dead 100 still alive inside the camp these are numbers that you could come up with a lot of different uh perspectives on but it's somewhere around these truths and over the process of the next uh weeks at the most but probably hours and days a good two uh probably about 200 of those of the 300 who escaped probably about 200 of them are murdered in the forests as uh German forces and local poles um go about the process of recapturing um and in for the most part when captured just immediately shot wherever they had stood at the process at the part of recapture so that kind of brings you to the end of August 2nd and into the few days thereafter of uh Nazi German forces kind of coming in from all directions to to attempt to recapture these individuals and I work a lot on extending our list of survivors and I've found some more uh from the day of the Revolt itself but for the most part it seems that somewhere around 70 have been identified from the day of the Revolt much more in other ways of survival and we will never I want to say we'll never have a full accounting of how many people survived the day of the revolt because August 2nd 1943 is 21 months before the end of the war so where we have this 200 person Gap in our understanding of what happened those 200 individuals may have been captured the hour after the revolt and they may have made it to May of 1945 before meeting their death in some other terrible way they would still be in my mind and I'm sure we'd agree like they would be a Treblinka Survivor who died in a later engagement and or later form of Nazi German torture but we'll never really know the full amount of people who got out on that day because of what time it took place in the war and the fact that you know even in the later years much of this whole area falls under what becomes the Soviet Bloc and we lose a lot of historical information and knowledge when we could have been doing research there earlier well these are really excellent points just thank you both for giving us some real sense about this uprising and for those who need simply mentioned get sucker Rod's book if you go back to the 1987 well he estimated about a hundred survived from the uprising so obviously Chad and Jacob are giving us more recent scholarship and also just acknowledging the fact that it's difficult it's really difficult to know but some final number of survivors were and is August 1943 that if you said the Soviets are anywhere close to liberating this area yet that's 11 months uh away so just the fact that if it's 70 if it's 100 if it's in between that's still an astonishing number of people to have made it that long when you're being hunted to your death by the SS my ukrainians you may be dealing with you know anti-Semitism uh firsthand so it's still an incredible story so we're both we're about out of time here unfortunately uh this has been such an incredible conversation so Chad I wanted to start with you with this one and just two questions to you both here is that first what can we say about the impact of the uprising and we didn't want to be Breezy there's so much one can say you've already mentioned the Soviet War Uprising that will happen in mid-october 1943 but what can we say about the impact this Revolt has and then something here including I know both of you have some personal um things to share about your own experiences here like what what does this site it's a site of remembrance today for Blanca what is this site of remembers mean to you both so Chad will you first on this one yeah um I would start with that very recent personal connection uh being I've been a professor for two years now um despite looking older than a professor uh who's only been in the job for two years should I have a previous career in the armies that got me to this game a little late but I got to teach this summer at Treblinka for the first time in my life I've been there as a student on study abroad I've been there to do research I've I've been there to see and walk the ground and this summer I got to actually teach at the memorial that exists today and for those who've never seen it or or um or been there at all um what you find at Treblinka and why I this goes to one of those questions that's kind of stalked this whole conversation is the world knows way less about treblenko because it is not the sort of um remaining infrastructure that you find at an Auschwitz so the huge masses of tourists that go to Auschwitz don't usually also go to Treblinka because All That Remains is a is a memorial but that Memorial you know signifies those 900 plus thousand lives taken at Treblinka and also this amazing resistance that we're talking about here um I think the importance of that resistance comes down to you know showing people that forms of pushing back against Nazi Germany took part took place in every aspect of the Holocaust in every point along the way in the Holocaust people escaped from columns being led toward mass shooting pits people revolted on trains people revolted an extermination camps they rose up in Warsaw they hid they saved lives of others they did everything they absolutely could and we just still don't talk about resistance enough this is an amazing instance of it but we should still you know pay to as much attention to those who just steadfastly remained Jewish that thing Nazis hated so much all the way to the end if that's all they could do and I think the last thing I would throw in there is that treblinka's resistance provides Treblinka Witnesses and we're able to have this whole conversation because they survived and wrote about it talked about it went to trials about it and they convicted now the sentences were out of all proportion to what those men had done but they convicted I think making a Humanities major do math but I think it was 96 percent of their guards that were put on trial were convicted if you had a trial Treblinka survivors would show up and that meant everywhere from Ukraine to a denaturalization proceeding in Miami Florida so they would go absolutely everywhere and they did and they all and they almost always convicted their guards so I think um that's part of their legacy on this resistance they they continued some form of resistance in the form of testimony and memory all the way up until the last one of the Revolt survivors Samuel willenberg passed away in 2016. well I appreciate you sharing that uh Jake we're going to turn you and Jeremy if you could show the first image of the memorial site I think it would really help the audience out as uh as both are sharing something about their experiences there thank you Jacob please yeah so I know we're short on time so I'll try to keep my comments brief because I think Chad and I could probably speak about this all day um but Jason to your questions why the resistance is so important why this Revolt is so important you know this Revolt accomplished really three things that the Nazis didn't want with Treblinka and so it actually flies in the face of exactly what the Nazis were trying to do the first Chad mentioned uh being Jewish and keeping that that identity alive the second is simply surviving themselves and this is if we look at the goal of treblinkas to kill Jews is to kill them and and so if you survive Treblinka if you survive one of these Reinhard camps you're literally going against what the Nazis wanted which is is good that's what you know that's that's what the point of resistance is and in fact by having this Revolt it gets you to the the third thing we have witnesses like Chad mentioned we know more about these camps and that was against the secrecy aspect the Nazis didn't want the world to know about these things and so people escaping and surviving that actually provides that blows up the secrecy aspect of it and why Revolt matters why armed Revolt matter matters because all forms of resistance certainly matter whether that someone is simply just staying alive for an extra day whether they're you know doing something to sabotage a Nazi Armament uh whatever they're trying to do but why the Revolt matters this is the first death camp revolved this is August 2nd 1943. because of that we have roughly 70 survivors of Treblinka because of that Revolt the initial pulse that gets out might have been 300 you know 200 are probably recaptured maybe another 30 but you know don't survive the end of the war but we have a chance at having a large number of survivors soapy Waterville happens a little bit late after this Revolt you have the same thing about the same number we have about 70 soby boar survivors the same type of situation you have this pulse out there belgets the other Reinhard Camp to bring this full circle there is no Revolt we have two survivors and that is not to say that those people weren't resisting but by having this type of armed Revolt at these other two camps we have a better chance of more people making it to the end of divorce it's simple math and so at belgets you don't have a ripple you have hundreds of thousands murdered to survivors and you know I think that kind of speaks to the importance of this armed resistance and why this is so extraordinary both here and at Sobe board and then to the other point to room you know with the memorial today um I the first time I was here I really didn't know how to feel I had been to Auschwitz I had been to maidonic those are both very well preserved spaces you can walk through the structures you can walk through the barracks you can touch things you it's very tactile um you go to a place like Treblinka or really any of the Reinhard camps the Nazis tear these camps down in 1943 early 1944 and they they they the war starting to go against them they don't want this to fall into enemy hands the major gas Chambers Auschwitz have been built uh there's they decide to tear these down and you know I was standing there and I just felt haunted by the space and that that word doesn't really do it justice but personally I have no connection to the site I don't have any you know ancestors that would have you know been sent there or I didn't I don't have any polish ancestors it's a Polish space I don't have any German relatives um but I was very much affected by that space and I wanted to know more about it I wanted to to make it real not so that I kid you know relive any gratuitous violence but because I wanted to understand what exactly transpired here and I think it's very important that we do uncover this details even if they make us uncomfortable because those are what the survivors and they really were survivors to not only survive Treblinka for someone like yankovnik who survived a year and then survived beyond the camp for over a year these people are really survivors in every sense of the word they almost always to a person take time to note the details of what happened here so the world doesn't forget what happened in this space they don't just say that so and so was shot they say they describe in detail what happened in the horrific aspects of Treblinka and I think they did that for a reason they don't want the world to ever question the brutality of what happened in this space this might have been an efficient Killing Grounds but it was not the clean industrial mass murder the Nazis hope this was horrific brutal some of the sites that people saw to be able to survive Treblinka is some of the most horrific things human beings have ever done to other human beings and so as uncomfortable as that makes as I think that is to me why it's so important to understand what happened in this exact space so that when we go there today we can not only honor those who were killed but we can also reflect on just how horrific it would have been to be in this exact spot now 80 80 years ago well the two of you have really aided us all in having a better comprehension of something that at some level really defies comprehension and that this this vast uh scale of mass murder over 900 000 people murdered in from Lincoln in 1942-43 and yet people rose up they have been doing so already prior to August 2nd 1943 but there's this real moment of Jewish resistance that does leave survivors and Witnesses testimony that's helped us reconstruct what happened and for my part I would just say I think conversations like these are a reminder that we need histories that really tie the course of the war the Nazi Genocide and resistance will firmly uh together that there's all kinds of links and connections here that need to have more light thrown on them and the two of you have really Advanced this moved us forward with that so Jacob thank you very much for sharing your expertise today it has been a great deal to see this really come together I want to thank our audience for for joining us I hope you've really gotten something out of this and that you'll consult our social media to see about future events that you can follow thank you very much thank you thank you Jason

Channel: The National WWII Museum

Views: 3,515

Keywords: treblinka, holocaust, treblinka uprising, ww2, world war two, wwii, world war ii, warsaw ghetto, world war ii history, world war ii interviews, world war ii explained, poland, ukraine, germany, history, 1942, 1943, uprising, resistance, concentration camp, death camp, extermination camp, education, webinar, ASU, NWW2 Museum, treblinka concentration camp tour, treblinka last survivor, treblinka archeology

Id: ESKSFhYsaBw

Length: 88min 21sec (5301 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023