#treblinka

Płaszów is not Treblinka…. This image is in a Flickr album called "Poland Holocaust", which includes quite a few entries that have nothing to do with the holocaust, or Poland, or are described with completely wrong information.

In this case, it's the description which is somewhat inaccurate: "Treblinka Memorial. 1,380,000 Jews slaughtered here. It was NOT a camp but an Extermination center. June 1, l942: Treblinka extermination camp opened, 700,000 Jews murdered there by August 1943".

Back in the real world, this is actually a photo of a monument that commemorates the victims of Płaszów Concentration Camp, which was operated by Nazi Germany from 1942 to 1945 and located on the outskirts of Kraków, in southern Poland.

At the time, Kraków was in the so-called "General Government", ie the territory of western Poland which was occupied by Germany in 1939 but not incorporated directly into the Third Reich (and was expanded in 1941 to include the District of Galicia).

The monument was created in 1964 and officially known as the "Monument to the Victims of Fascism in Kraków".

It's a long way from Treblinka, which is a village located about 50 miles north east of Poland's capital city, Warsaw.

In 1941, the Germans created the Treblinka labour camp near to the village and the adjacent Treblinka railway station, from which the camp took its name.

The labour camp operated from September 1941 to July 1944, and during that period approximately 20,000 people were imprisoned there, of whom about 10,000 died or were murdered. Most of the victims were ethnically Polish (ie Slavic).

A second camp was created just over a mile away in 1942 - one of three secret death camps set up for Operation Reinhard - the German plan to exterminate Poland's Jews (the other two were Bełżec and Sobibór). All three of these camps were equipped with gas chambers disguised as showers.

The Treblinka extermination camp operated between 23rd July 1942 and 19th October 1943. During this time, it is estimated that between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were murdered in its gas chambers, along with 2,000 Romani people.

Approximately 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were the camp's first victims. Thousands of Jews were rounded up in the ghetto and deported to Treblinka on a daily basis from 23rd July 1942 to 21st September 1942, in what the Germans called Grossaktion Warschau.

The Treblinka labour and extermination camps were managed by the German SS with assistance from "Trawniki" guards, who were recruited from Soviet prisoners of war after the launch of Operation Barbarossa. Both camps were destroyed by the Germans, so very little of them remains today.

There are several monuments at the former Treblinka railway station and both camp sites. The most famous one (shown in the images below) is situated where the gas chambers in the Treblinka extermination camp used to be.

chooses chocolate over 

violent revenge.