“Today, the whole world knows the story of this place, which is one of the symbols of the Holocaust," Polish President Andrzej Duda wrote in a letter that was read out during the anniversary commemorations on Tuesday.
"It is our duty – of Poles, Jews, Europeans - to guard the truth about what happened here and in other German camps,” he added.
“The crimes committed by the officers of the Nazi Third Reich must never be allowed to repeat themselves at any time,” Duda also said.
At the commemoration, the director of the Jewish Historical Institute, Monika Krawczyk, said: “It was a fight of the doomed for dignity and humanity.”
She quoted the memoirs of one of the leaders of the uprising, Samuel Willenberg, who wrote that “the prisoners did not think whether they would stay alive” and that their sole purpose was to “destroy the death factory.”
She recalled that Willenberg also fought in the Warsaw Uprising almost exactly a year later.
Exactly 79 years ago, on August 2, 1943, around 700 Jews staged an armed revolt in the Treblinka camp in German-occupied Poland.
According to the Treblinka Museum, in Poland's north-east, around 200 fighters managed to escape, but half of them were later killed after a chase in cars and on horses. Only 70 survived World War II.
On July 22, 1942, Germans began deporting Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp. Over the two months that followed, from 5,000 to 7,000 Jews were transported every day by train to Treblinka, where they were exterminated.
In August 1943, German soldiers began a gradual "liquidation" of the camp. In November, the ground at Treblinka was plowed.
The Treblinka death camp operated between July 1942 and October 1943. During this time, between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were murdered there by the Germans, along with 2,000 Roma people.
Treblinka was the second-largest extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland after Auschwitz-Birkenau.
(jh/gs)
Source: IAR