Grey: Making Meaning Out of the Atrocities of Treblinka

By Hannah Gardenswartz, HIA Fellow

A marker at the entrance of the Treblinka extermination camp
Photo by Hannah Gardenswartz

The oppressive uniformity of the grey sky could not possibly prepare me for today’s discussions.  When talking about a death camp and the cold-blooded eradication of an entire ethnic/religious group, there is no possible preparation.  After spending a few hours at Treblinka, I do not think I can fully process the experience. How do you totally understand mass killings and the systematic meticulous horrors that were created here?  If I have never been hungry, a basic form of human suffering, how can I understand the higher methodological and mechanized devastation of the death camps?  By the end of the day, I felt much like the mornings sky, completely drained of color and emotion.

The day stated with a short documentary on the life of Jews in Warsaw shown at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which started a highly emotional day for the HIA Fellows.  Before heading to Treblinka, I was hoping to use reason detached from emotion to understand what Treblinka means, but the film clearly emphasized how emotional the visit would inevitably be.  Despite overly-dramatized special effects, the movie was able to use facts and old photographs to create a tiny slice of reality.  Before the War, in the 1920s and 1930s, the life of Jews in Warsaw was colorful and dynamic, but after 1939, the black and white photographs seemed all too accurate.  As the Nazis methodically killed Jews, the grim reality of the Jewish people seems best described only in shades of grey.

Once we got on the bus to Treblinka, I kept thinking about how strange it was to be embarking on this trip while life continued in Warsaw.  While riding the bus, we passed by Umschlagplatz, where deportations from Warsaw happened. So many places represented where Jews were killed.  Today, there are offices and people running businesses. One thing we learned was that following all genocides, there is denial. Because the entire Ghetto was razed to the ground, the memory of many parts of this history does not exist.  However, one cannot live a life by surrendering to the horrors of the past.  There has to be movement forward.

"Never Again" marker stone at the Treblinka remembrance site
Photo by Hannah Gardenswartz

After completing their task, the Nazis had carefully and fully disassembled the camp and placed a farm building on it, eradicating any mark of Treblinka.  In the 1960’s, the monument that stands today was created.  The irregular grey stones could either be solid plumes of ash or the hardened tears that we have not been allowed to cry.  And, for me, it was so hard to see the pain and suffering, because juxtaposed with the concrete centerpiece and the irregular granite rocks is the picturesque Polish countryside.  There is nothing to tell you that 900,000 Jews, people, were murdered systematically, and their remains burned and hidden as organic ash, found only by geological surveys.  Jews were turned into the fertile soil that has allowed the forest to grow.  Perhaps this is why I like the simplicity of the monument, because it allowed me to project my own meaning onto the grey.

The remembrance site at Treblinka
Photo by Hannah Gardenswartz

We can never know for sure who (or even how many) died at the site, but there is an impersonal aspect of the individual murders.  The impersonal aspect of the site robs people of their individual humanity, and even in death, even in memorial for their lack of humane death.  Our guide, Tomaz Cebulski, was a brilliant historian who spent the day walking around and giving us an in-depth explanation of what we were seeing and creating a framework for what we were feeling.  He said that what happened here was not necessarily “inhumane” because it was committed by humans.  If we are going to remember the individual names for the perpetrators, it seems almost disrespectful to not acknowledge the individual victims.

I am a little frightened by the conclusions I have drawn.  Perhaps this fear stems from my confusion, as my way of noting my lack of context.  After all, this monument was not made for me.  It was made as a place of mourning and closure for the survivors and families of the victims.  How can I remember as someone who was never there?  I can learn and grieve and respect, but I cannot remember.  I feel a need to know why.  That is what is challenging.  I feel a need for a why, but I have to simply accept that for now, I do not fully understand.

A Jewish gravestone
Photo by Hannah Gardenswartz

We were told that Jewish gravestones were pulled from the cemeteries and used as bricks in Treblinka, and that the only brick buildings in the camp were the armory and the gas chambers.  This means that there must have been a tombstone within the gas chambers, seeing and marking death, a death so vastly different than the one it was designed to protect.  What force in the universe allows such horrible irony?  This is one of the questions for which we must search for an answer. This is my challenge; I must make my own context and conclusions.  So my conclusion for now is “I do not know.  I simply do not know.”  Thinking to the future, I must remember confusion of the in-between space.  I now feel challenged to continue to search for answers and create my meaning out of the grey-area.