Треблинка: место Холокоста и памяти жертв

the adjacent Nazi German extermination camp named after the village

Treblinka is a village located in eastern Poland, situated in the present day district of Gmina Małkinia Górna, within Ostrów Mazowiecka County in Masovian Voivodeship, some north east of Warsaw. The village lies close to the Bug River. It has 350 inhabitants. It is known as the site during World War II of one of the Nazi extermination camps, named after the village. An estimated 850,000 people were murdered here during the Holocaust in Poland, from the summer of 1942 to October 1943. In addition, the Treblinka I Arbeitslager, a forced labor camp, had operated about six miles away, from June 1941 to 23 July 1944. During this period, more than 10,000 prisoners are estimated to have died from executions, malnutrition, disease and mistreatment.

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, when thousands of dead bodies of victims were left unburied, 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. Some of these prisoners were aided in escaping across the Bug River by the Polish resistance, but few survived. The first commandant of the camp, from 11 July 1942 until 31 August 1942, was Irmfried Eberl, relieved of his duties for not being efficient and secretive enough about the camp's murder operation. 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.

[[File:Treblinka, Obóz Zagłady Treblinka II fotopolska. eu (331399). jpg|thumb|upright|Memorial at Treblinka II, with 17,000 quarry stones symbolising gravestones. The monument was unveiled by Zenon Kliszko, the Marshal of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland on 10 May 1964; attendees included survivors of the Treblinka uprising from Israel, France, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. The official ceremony was attended by 30,000 people, when Treblinka was declared a national monument of martyrology. The camp custodian's house (built nearby in 1960) was adapted as an exhibition space following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Since the late 20th century, the number of visitors coming to Treblinka from abroad has 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.