Treblinka was the location of Treblinka extermination camp where an estimated 850,000 people were systematically murdered during the Holocaust in Poland. About 800,000 of them were Polish Jews. The first deportations took place in the course of the Grossaktion Warsaw with about 254,000 Warsaw Ghetto inmates brought in to their deaths in Holocaust trains in the summer of 1942. At the layover yard of Treblinka railway station the wagons waiting for "processing" were witnessed by Franciszek Ząbecki. During the early period of the camp's operation, thousands of dead bodies of victims left unburied had accumulated to such a point that the putrid odor of decaying human remains could be smelled for approximately in every direction. It was evident that mass extermination was taking place at the camp, which caused panic among the villagers. The onset of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising inspired renewed hopes for an escape among the Treblinka Sonderkommandos. On 19 April 1943 one of the last Jewish transports of 7,000 victims along with the Warsaw insurgents were brought in for gassing. Soon later Treblinka became the first death camp ever to experience a prisoner uprising against the SS, which erupted on 2 August 1943 under the leadership of former Polish Army officer Dr. Berek Lajcher. The first commandant of the camp from until 31 August 1942 was Irmfried Eberl, relieved of his duties for not being efficient and secretive enough about the camp's murder operation. He was succeeded by Franz Stangl as the second commandant of Treblinka II Vernichtungslager from 1 September 1942 until the 1943 Jewish uprising. The Nazi hierarchy took measures to modify the killing process under Stangl, who built more efficient gas chambers and massive cremation pyres for the incineration of corpses. When the Treblinka death camp ended operations in October 1943, the Nazis attempted to remove all evidence of its existence and the mass murder carried out there. Relatively little physical evidence remains. It can be examined at the Treblinka museum led by Edward Kopówka, with a steadily growing number of visitors. An earlier camp known as Treblinka IArbeitslager, equipped with heavy machinery, was located from Treblinka. Between June 1941 and 23 July 1944, more than half of its 20,000 inmates mining gravel for the German military road construction, died from summary executions, hunger, disease and mistreatment under Theodor van Eupen.
Treblinka extermination camp museum
The construction of a stone monument with abstract reliefs and Jewish symbols representing the cross-European trend toward avant-garde forms was inaugurated on 21 April 1958 based on design by sculptor Franciszek Duszeńko. The monument was unveiled by Zenon Kliszko, the Marshal of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland on 10 May 1964, in the presence of survivors of the Treblinka uprising from Israel, France, Czechoslovakia and Poland during an official ceremony attended by 30,000 people, when Treblinka was declared a national monument of martyrology. The camp custodian's house was turned into an exhibition space following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. The number of visitors coming to Treblinka from abroad steadily increased. An exhibition centre at the former camp opened in 2006. It was later expanded and made into a branch of the Siedlce Regional Museum, under Dr Edward Kopówka.
