At a time when Gaza has been compared to the Warsaw Ghetto, it is worth recalling a few historical realities.
The Warsaw Ghetto, between November 1940—when it was sealed—and July 1942, had 120,000 inhabitants per square kilometer, more than double the density of the densest areas in the densest cities on the planet. By comparison, the density of the entire Gaza Strip is twenty times lower…
On July 22, 1942, the first convoy left the ghetto for Treblinka, 80 km from Warsaw. The construction of the camp—now known as Treblinka II—had barely been completed. It was the third extermination camp of Operation Reinhardt, namely the planned liquidation of the Jews of the General Government of Poland. Bełżec had begun gassing Jews in March 1942, Sobibór in May. From that point on, every day 6,000 people, and up to 10,000 on some days, were sent to Treblinka and gassed upon arrival with carbon monoxide, except for a very small group of Jews forced to handle the corpses: the Sonderkommandos. On September 21, the pits were full and the roundups stopped, especially since the planned quota had been reached. 280,000 Jews from the ghetto were murdered in 60 days. About 50,000 people remained—slave laborers or those living in hiding. The entry of the German army in April 1943 triggered the heroic uprising, and the Warsaw Ghetto was destroyed. Most of the survivors, sent to labor camps, were murdered on November 3, 1943, in the Lublin region, at Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki—42,000 dead in a few hours, on a day the Nazis cynically called the Harvest Festival (Erntefest).
As for the death factory that was Treblinka, it extended its “expertise” across much of Poland, as evoked today by a field of 17,000 stones, more than 200 of which bear the names of annihilated Polish Jewish towns. Added to this were Jews deported from Slovakia, Greece, and Germany, small groups of Roma, and Poles shot near the mass graves that Himmler ordered emptied and burned beginning in early 1943.
98 to 99% of those murdered at Treblinka II were Jews. In its gas chambers there were 900,000 victims, the same number as at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where it is estimated that 97% of the gassings were carried out on Jews. If Auschwitz weighs more heavily in collective memory, it is because of its international character, but above all because of the survivors of the adjacent labor camp, in which 200,000 additional people perished, including 70,000 to 75,000 non-Jewish Poles. At Treblinka, there were only about sixty survivors, those of the Sonderkommando revolt of August 2, 1943—one survivor for 18,000 Jews murdered. Samuel Willenberg, who died in 2016, was the last.
But before them, another man escaped from Treblinka II. His name is almost unknown, and I would like to pay tribute to him.
His name was Abraham Krzepicki, deported to Treblinka on August 25. That day or the next, an emissary of the Polish resistance clandestinely entered the ghetto, from which about 150,000 people had already been deported. This emissary was Jan Karski, who later wrote:
“The streets are crowded, as if everyone lived outside. Everyone tries to sell what they own: three onions, two onions, a few nails. Everyone begs. Hunger. Terrible faces of children running in all directions, or sitting motionless near their mothers. It was not humanity; it was a kind of hell.”
This was in a ghetto already emptied of 150,000 deported inhabitants. Where they had been sent, Karski’s two interlocutors, Leon Feiner and Adolphe Berman, did not know, but they knew it was toward death.
Abraham Krzepicki was selected as a Sonderkommando. For one month, he lived through the apocalyptic scenes at the entrance to the gas chambers and carried corpses to the mass graves. He managed to escape, returned to the ghetto, haunted by his visions. For three months, from December 1942 to March 1943, he gave Rachel Auerbach a long and devastating testimony for Oneg Shabbat, the group formed around Emmanuel Ringelblum. This testimony was recovered after the war among the milk cans containing part of the archives, but aside from a confidential Yiddish edition, it was not published until 2017, only in Polish and not in a scholarly edition. The text was probably considered too desperate. Krzepicki was killed fighting during the ghetto uprising.
90% of Poland’s 3,300,000 Jews died during the war, and nearly one third of the murders took place at Treblinka. This gives a sense of the weight of this site for Jews. However, unlike Auschwitz, the traces were almost entirely destroyed, and the work of memory there is particularly dependent on the political choices underlying material reconstruction.
Two kilometers from the extermination camp stood a labor camp, opened as early as 1941. Polish prisoners were temporarily held there, generally for economic reasons.
Several thousand prisoners died there, and the area has recently been covered with crosses in their memory. But independent historiography shows that most of the victims were also Jews, employed as laborers in this camp and then shot.
Nearby, overcrowded convoys from the ghetto waited for hours under a blazing sun before being directed to the gas chambers. The ignoble trafficking to which this terrible wait gave rise—a glass of water in exchange for the meager belongings the victims still carried—well documented by historians and mentioned in Claude Lanzmann’s film, has been transformed into acts of charity.
Gradually, the labor camp became a major site of memory testifying to Polish martyrdom. This has occurred since the PiS came to power in 2015, and the orientation was not fundamentally altered by Donald Tusk’s return to government in 2023.
As a result, the distinction between Treblinka I, a labor camp in which several hundred, perhaps several thousand non-Jewish Poles died, and Treblinka II, where 900,000 Polish Jews were gassed, is fading in the public eye.
It is not a matter for Polish nationalists of denying the Shoah, but of imposing the image of a Catholic Poland that was also the victim of an attempted genocide. Any attempt to relativize this tragedy—something no serious historian seeks to do—is considered anti-Polonism, an offense now punishable by law.
This mental framework lay at the origin of the conflicts surrounding the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz and the fierce controversies around the fundamental work of Jan Gross, particularly his book Neighbors, published in 2001. The book revealed that Poles burned their Jewish neighbors alive in the village of Jedwabne in 1941, before the arrival of the Germans. This fact was acknowledged by the Polish government at the time, which recognized the need to face the past. This is no longer the case today, and criticism of Jan Gross’s work has become commonplace within an “official” historiography.
The name Jedwabne now appears on one of the stones at Treblinka II, among the Jewish villages annihilated by the Nazis…
It is an alternative history, a phenomenon that does not exist only in Poland.
Dr. Richard Prasquier