Denialism Polish style: The case of the Treblinka site

Poland systematically denies any Polish responsibility for the extermination of the Jews. In this article, Elżbieta Janicka, a specialist in the Shoah and antisemitism, denounces the way in which, at Treblinka, this deceptive memorial policy multiplies historical fabrications.

 

 

This article was published in a historical supplement to the week-end issue of the Polish daily “Gazeta Wyborcza” of April 20-21, 2024. The argument of the author inscribes itself into the discussion about Polish state institutions that produce a counter-history of the Holocaust and have at their disposal extraordinary means of propaganda in Poland and out of Poland. It is especially the case of the Witold Pilecki Institute of Solidarity and Valor, created by the authoritarian regime of the Law and Justice party in 2017, and the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) created after 1989. These institutions that are centers of fight against Holocaust research pursue their activities after the October 2023 victory of the democratic coalition in the parliamentary elections. The author demonstrates how the public museum of Treblinka also contributes to the production of this counter-history. Elżbieta Janicka bases her argument, among others, on the sequences recorded in Poland by Claude Lanzmann during the shooting of his film Shoah. 

On May 16, 2024, following the publication of Denial Polish style, the director of the Treblinka Museum informed among others the Agency of Internal Security, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the Institute of National Remembrance and the Drohiczyn Diocesan Curia on an attempt at incitement to religious and ethnic dissensions on the part of Elżbieta Janicka.^[1].

Jean-Charles Szurek

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Treblinka was the largest German Nazi extermination camp for Jews after Auschwitz-Birkenau, a place of slaying and final rest of nearly a million Jewish victims, mainly from Poland, although transports also brought others from almost all German-occupied European countries. 

The Treblinka Museum covers the former grounds of the railway station in the village of Treblinka, the German Nazi death camp Treblinka II (1942-1943), the German Nazi forced labor camp Treblinka I (1941-1944), the Black Road connecting the two camps, as well as the gravel pit and the execution site adjacent to the labor camp. 

Holocaust denial in the transatlantic sense does not exist in Poland. In Poland, there is no repudiation of the Holocaust as a German, Nazi murder of Jews of occupied Europe. Holocaust denial Polish style means ignoring the Polish reality of the Holocaust and disclaiming the place and role of Poles in the structure of the crime. 

The railway station 

Robbing the living and dead Jews did not begin in Treblinka and did not end there. The systemic character and European context of the phenomenon has been analyzed by Jan Gross in cooperation with Irena Grudzińska-Gross in “Golden Harvest.”^[2] However, if we limit our gaze to the camp constellation, the Eldorado Treblinka began a few kilometers from the death camp at the railway station, which simultaneously served the circulation of passenger and freight trains running according to the usual timetable. 

Engineer Jerzy Królikowski, housed in the village of Treblinka because of his work on the nearby bridge construction, wrote in his “Memories from the surroundings of Treblinka from the time of the occupation” about Polish crowds besieging death transports. “When I first saw these people at the train from afar, I thought that, moved by noble compassion, they had come to give water and nourishment to those locked in the carriages. The workers I asked dispelled my illusions, saying that it was an ordinary trade in water and food, and at high prices. 

[…] When the transport was not convoyed by the German gendarmerie, who would not allow anyone near it, but by all other categories of German mercenaries, crowds would gather with buckets of water and bottles of moonshine in their pockets. Water was intended for sale to people locked in the wagons, and moonshine for bribing the escorts, who in return agreed to allow accessing the wagons. 

When there was no moonshine or the guards were not satisfied with this kind of bribe, the girls would throw their arms around their necks and would shower them with kisses, to get permission to reach the wagons. After obtaining the consent, trade began with the unfortunate prisoners who were dying of thirst and paid 100 zlotys for a small cup of water. Apparently, there were also cases where some took hundred-zloty bills and did not give water.”^[3] 

“All that was rushing on gold”

Szymon Frajermauer, who survived in the USSR and at the end of the 1950s visited Treblinka, the place of execution of his native Jewish Częstochowa, spoke about those who “cleaned up” and “made a bundle:” “Because when  someone in those wagons wanted a glass of water or slop to drink, they demanded a diamond, and when they saw gold, they didn’t want it, they wanted it with a diamond,  for half a glass of water.”<footnote>5 USC Shoah Foundation 42584, Szymon Orłowski [Frajermauer] interviewed by Zofia Zaks on January 7, 1998.</footnote> The world knows the face of Henryk Gawkowski from the poster of Claude Lanzmann’s film “Shoah.” He was one of the Polish railway men of the Ostbahn running between the Warsaw Umschlagplatz and the Białystok Poleski railway station and Treblinka, transporting Jews into the death camp. Gawkowski told Lanzmann about the Polish crowds besieging trains at the station in the village of Treblinka: “All that was rushing on gold.”^[4] The accounts of Poles and Jews are unanimous in this respect. 

During the year and a half that the extermination camp was in operation, and with it the systematic looting and murder of Jews at the Treblinka village railway station, many Poles came to this place, even from faraway lands.

The transports were surrounded so tightly that the Ukrainian and Baltic supervisors – although sometimes also Polish policemen – had to shoot to frighten the crowd so it would draw apart and another group of wagons could set off towards the death camp. Then, the guards were firing in the air but first and foremost, almost constantly, they were shooting at Jews.  

Engineer Królikowski’ wife left the village for safety reasons, “because she had to stay in the house all day, since shots were often fired in its direction from the station…”. The engineer’s subordinates, on the other hand, “stopped taking the paved road to work, because it ran right next to the tracks and the railway station. We walked along small paths, through the meadows, making detours, thus avoiding the need to fall to the ground when the cannonade began.”

Jewish victims died in mass: “during the day, corpses were collected from the station onto several platform cars and transported to the death camp.”^[5]  During the year and a half that the extermination camp was in operation, and with it the systematic looting and murder of Jews at the Treblinka village railway station, many Poles came to this place, even from faraway lands. With no one having taken on the responsibility of maintaining his grave, the parish of Prostyń, which Treblinka is part of, in the end decided to get rid of his grave.

Pride in shame 

 “‘A man must be measured by the size of his heart‘ – John Paul II. In memory of Jan Maletka, murdered by the Germans on August 20, 1942 for helping Jews. In memory of the Jews murdered in the German Nazi death camp in Treblinka.” In polish. Below, the same in English. A stone with a plaque with this inscription was unveiled at the site of the railway station in the village of Treblinka in November 2021.

Of course, it was not Jan Maletka who commemorated himself as a benefactor of the Jews, even to the point of sacrificing his own life, but the Pilecki Institute, a powerful institution created under the auspices of the Law and Justice party to promote Poland’s good name, which signed the plaque in his name. The words “of the inhabitants” have also been added, to underline the legitimacy of the initiative. But none of the residents know about it. Signatures were indeed collected, but in favor of a different layout for the old station.

Denialism Polish style is therefore not only the negation of facts, but also creation of “alternative facts.“

Jan Grabowski wrote an article on this subject entitled “Monument of Polish Virtue, or the Scandal in Treblinka,” which appeared in “Gazeta Wyborcza” and then in the “New York Times.“^[6] The case was also taken up by “Haaretz.” The Witold Pilecki Institute of Solidarity and Valor is a subject of jokes at Holocaust researchers’ international conferences. But the monument at the Treblinka station is still standing. 

Denialism Polish style is therefore not only the negation of facts, but also creation of “alternative facts.” “Alternative facts” often are generated from scratch. An example of it is the monument that Professor Magdalena Gawin, the founder of the Pilecki Institute, then in the rank of Deputy Minister of Culture and National Heritage, erected in memory of her relative who was “murdered for helping Jews.” She erected it, although she had no other claim to it than the fact that she wanted to and could. Press publications on the subject have also appeared in several countries and languages. At the Treblinka railway station, the Pilecki Institute obtained an “alternative fact” by equipping the “old fact” with a meaning opposite to the original one. This type of special effect has been defined by Lew Rubinstein as pride in shame.

The Pilecki Institute is not the only player in this affair. When someone pointed out what was behind these celebrations of Polish “virtue” – a lucrative business on the backs of the Jews – by spraying the stone dedicated to Maletka with red paint, the Treblinka Museum immediately had the “damage” removed. Not the stele, far from it, but the red paint. On the other hand, it did not skimp on surveillance. The old line of trees was replaced by a forest of cameras.

Amor Patriae suprema lex

A candle with a golden cross and the inscription: “Treblinka Museum – we remember” is burning under the denialist monument. The Treblinka Museum is a state institution. The state nominally remains secular. Despite this, the institution complements its signature by a cross and does it systematically. On the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in nearby Prostyń, an identical candle burns on a plaque topped with a cross and with the inscription “Amor Patriae suprema lex,” or “Love of the Fatherland is the highest law,” as if the mission of the Museum was to legitimize this slogan instead of raising awareness of its consequences. 

No less interesting than what and how the Treblinka Museum “remembers” is how long it has been doing it. The management of the facility has not changed since 1996. It so happens that in November of that year, a photographic documentation of the railway station, the death camp and the forced labor camp was made by Reinhart Kosseleck, a historian and theoretician of historiography, as well as a documentary photographer.^[7]

The devastation of the station area was necessary to take matters into their own hands: transforming the site to the point of unrecognizability and endowing it with a counter-history.

Photographs still show railway tracks and semaphores, as well as two signal boxes and two transformer stations. Three other buildings remain from the original station, one of which has since been demolished rather than renovated after a partial fire. You can see the exact outline of the platforms, the four flowerbeds and supports bearing the slogans “No more war” and “No more Treblinka”. Trees frame the asphalt square that still existed in 2015, between the old railroad tracks and sidings, and the busy road that runs parallel to them. It was here, in the shade of the square’s poplars, that the “inhuman Poles”, as expressed in a study by the Jewish Historical Commission of Białystok, engaged in their sinister trade for a year and a half.

Since then, everything has been meticulously razed to the ground, the asphalt ripped up, the poplars felled, even though the construction of a road in place of the railroad line didn’t require it. But the devastation of the station area was necessary to take matters into their own hands: transforming the site to the point of unrecognizability and endowing it with a counter-history. It was also thanks to this devastation that the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage was able to fund specialized research to “reconstitute the topography of the former Treblinka station”, which any railway worker in the village, and indeed most of its inhabitants, can locate in minute detail. We’re somewhere between the subject of a sketch and a piece of information likely to be of interest to the Court of Auditors.

Advertisement space 

The former fatal marketplace today resembles advertisement space since the cacophony of artifacts cramming this place also consists of information about sponsors. In addition to the Pilecki Institute, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the local authorities of the “Mazovia Heart of Poland” Voivodeship, as well as Bildungswerk Stanisław Hantz, that is, an association named after “a Polish survivor of the concentration camps Auschwitz I, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Groß-Rosen, Hersbruck, which was a sub-camp of the Flossenbürg camp, and finally Dachau,” are commemorated here. On the other side of former railway tracks, replacing the signboard with the station’s name, the village of Treblinka, in turn, recommends to our attention “The Oak of Remembrance planted to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of Poland Regaining Independence.” 

Back at the marketplace we also have a promotion of the history of the region. For example, we read about nearby Prostyń: “In the place of the church founded in 1511 by the owners of villages of Prostyń, there is now the Catholic Basilica of the Holy Trinity and St. Anne. In 1920, the Death Hussars Squadron was sworn in Prostyń. During World War II, a Penal Labor Camp for Poles and an Extermination Camp were established in the parish, in Treblinka, where the Germans murdered about 900,000 Jews. On July 19, 1944, the retreating Germans blew up the church.” 

In other explanations of historical nature, there is not a word about the Polish context of events that took place at the station either. In the above fragment, however, there is a Polonization of the forced labor camp, i.e. the establishment of a false symmetry between the Treblinka I and Treblinka II camps, commonly called, also by the employees of the Treblinka Museum, Polish camp and Jewish camp. This slowly familiarizes us with the message that the Treblinka Museum has for us.

Treblinka II

The situation on the site of the former Treblinka II extermination camp deserves a separate discussion beyond the scope of this text. I will only mention the Treblinka Museum’s respect for the so-called Polish sensitivity, that is, the total insensitivity of visitors who, having come face to face with the remains of nearly a million Jews, utter a loud and powerful cry: “There is nothing to see here.” 

To have something to look at instead of nothing, the Museum set up a permanent exhibition of photographs by the last commandant of the camp, Kurt Franz, who in a gesture of sadistic delight portrayed giant dredging (excavators) used for digging pits to make room for the bodies of Jewish victims, and to extract decomposed bodies, once buried, to further destroy them. And it doesn’t matter that the same photographs in an even larger selection can be seen in the museum building as part of the permanent exhibition. You don’t have to have the spirit of the little handyman to agree with director Edward Kopówka that such a dredging machine is really something! 

Inaugurated in 1964, the sculptural and spatial project for Treblinka by Adam Haupt, Franciszek Duszeńko and Franciszek Strynkiewicz (winner of the competition of the Ministry of Culture and Art in 1955) is one of the most outstanding in the history of world art. Its starting point was the desire to put an end to the systematic and systemic exploitation of the remains of Polish Jews by Polish Christians in search of Jewish gold from the antisemitic phantasm. In the first half of the 1960s, the area was covered with concrete on which big stones were placed. Some of them were carved with the names of Jewish communities exterminated in Treblinka. 

Judging by Kosseleck’s documentation, this was the case at least until 1996, that is,  until the nomination of the current management of the institution. Today in Treblinka a surprise awaits us in the form of a stone with an inscription “Jedwabne.” Polish business in Treblinka – this time symbolic – does not end at the former railway station. 

The Jedwabne lie 

On July 10, 1941, when the Germans had not yet dreamed of Treblinka, all the Jews whom the Poles could have caught in the village of Jedwabne, after a whole day of torture in the market square at the foot of the local church, today, John Paul II Square, were herded into a barn and burned alive. Men, women, children. Some died bludgeoned to death by their Polish neighbors in the Jewish cemetery, others while trying to hide or escape. Not to mention victims of the protracted pogrom that began in Jedwabne at the end of June 1941, after the Wehrmacht had passed through. 

Jedwabne turned out to be a paradigmatic crime and became a symbol of the phenomena and processes that made up the Polish context of the Holocaust. That is why denialism Polish style, by analogy with the Auschwitz lie, is called the Jedwabne lie.

The fate of the Jews of Jedwabne, recounted in 1945 by a witness, Szmul Wasersztejn, and described by historian Szymon Datner in 1946, became widely known in 2000 with the premiere of Agnieszka Arnold’s film The Neighbors, the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book of the same name and the ensuing debate in Poland^[8]. A new Polish school of Holocaust history was also born at this time. A new one was needed because the previous school, founded in the immediate post-war period by survivor-researchers, had been pulverized by Polish antisemitism from below and above. This time, it came very close. Only recently, the new school has been the object of unprecedented attacks.

Jedwabne turned out to be a paradigmatic crime and became a symbol of the phenomena and processes that made up the Polish context of the Holocaust. That is why denialism Polish style, by analogy with the Auschwitz lie, is called the Jedwabne lie. The stone with the inscription “Jedwabne” in Treblinka – assuring us that the Jedwabne Jewish community was murdered here by the Germans – is a Jedwabne lie par excellence. 

However, that is not all. Near the stone with the inscription “Jedwabne” there is a stone with the inscription “Radziłów.” The crime in Radziłów differed from the one in Jedwabne in that it had been committed by Poles three days earlier, on July 7, 1941. On November second, 1942, twenty Jews who had managed to escape Polish attacks in Radziłów then gathered back in the town were deported by the Germans to the camp in Bogusze, from where they could be sent to Auschwitz. On the same November second, 1942, the Germans transported 30 (for a while) surviving Jews who gathered in Jedwabne after the massacre through Łomża to the camp in Zambrów. Some of the camp’s Jewish prisoners were murdered on the spot, some were deported to Treblinka, some to Auschwitz.^[9] It is not known who ended up where. 

These inscriptions (Jedwabne, Radziłów) weren’t there originally. When I spotted them in the summer of 2014, they had been carefully covered with gray paint. The light and shade had made them visible for a moment. At the time, I thought they were a lie from the 1960s waiting to be removed under the expert eye of a curator. A year later, the inscriptions shone in a fresh black, beautifully restored. The Polish state’s fight against the new Polish School of Shoah Research was in full swing.

Treblinka I

Poles were usually imprisoned in Treblinka I for a definite period, from a week or two to several months, most often “for a contingent,” that is, for failure to meet the mandatory supplies imposed by the Germans. After serving their sentence, they received an appropriate certificate to show if necessary. Some Poles were employed for remuneration in Treblinka I and went there as one goes to work. Work gave them the opportunity to earn additional money on illegal trade with Jewish prisoners and as intermediaries between the camp’s Polish prisoners and the outside. 

Arrested by the Germans at the request of the Polish mayor, Klemens Młynik was imprisoned in Treblinka I for six months, “for making vodka., as he put it. Two other people arrested with him were released by the Germans after interrogation. Młynik returned to his home village before the end of his sentence: “There was a typhus epidemic in the camp. A month before my dismissal, I fell ill and was freed. A sick Jew was not treated, but immediately shot, while Poles were treated.” 

Present in Treblinka during Operation Reinhardt, “One Sunday afternoon, a witness saw a large number of people herded towards the forest and shots from machine guns were heard. The next day, Poles were forced to bury them. There were three large pits (about the size of an average house) filled with human bodies. […] Germans were keeping an eye on us. Jews who worked with us were shot in the following way: they put them face down on the ground, placed the barrel of a rifle to the back of their heads and shot them.”^[10]

The liquidation of the camp was also governed by separate laws for Jews and Poles. Between 500 and 700 Jews were shot. During that time Polish prisoners were locked up in barracks and then released. 

It happened that Polish prisoners of the camp died or were killed. All but a few Jews imprisoned in the camp were killed. Names of most of Treblinka I labor camp Polish victims are known. These victims have been registered in post-war censuses, mourned by their families, and individually commemorated on family graves in local cemeteries. Jewish victims were, are and will remain anonymous. The same is true of Roma victims. There were about 300 Polish victims in total, while the total number of Treblinka I victims was 10-12 thousand according to the estimate made by the Red Army commission after the mass graves were opened in August 1944.^[11]

From symmetry to priority 

Approaching the forced labor camp Treblinka I, we are greeted by a signpost in three languages: “Droga Krzyżowa. Via Crucis. Way of the Cross.” The crosses marking the Stations of the Cross stretch from here to the camp’s place of executions, suggesting that we are heading towards Christian Golgotha. And in fact, this place of execution of predominantly Jewish victims looks like Christian Golgotha. In 2015, the number of crosses increased to 140. Currently, there are 296 of them. Further ones are not impossible. Each of the crosses is an individual, personal commemoration of a Catholic victim. There is also a mound to the memory of the “unknown.”  Also with a cross. 

The monument made of red sandstone, originally conceived as a commemoration of all the victims, also has been supplemented with a cross and baptized – literally – into a “Polish monument,” as indicated by a plaque with the logo of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the local authorities of Mazovia. Christianization was not enough, we also have Polonization. 

Christianization is, of course, Catholicization, because the “Polish monument” now serves as an altar for celebrating Roman Catholic masses, as the Treblinka Museum proudly indicates in one of its publications, showing Bishop Antoni Pacyfik Dydycz behind a sacrificial table at the site which once included victims of other religions. 

In short, a Polish crusade began: first for the symmetry of Polish and Jewish fates, and subsequently for Polish primacy in martyrdom.

The idea of a Christian triumph over the dead Jewish body dates back at least to the Crusades. In post-war Poland, it was revived by John Paul II, celebrating a mass on the ramp in Birkenau in 1979 at the cross on which the Polish Christ of Nations had died, as it was clear from the Mass’ design. Following this violation, a Roman Catholic church was installed in one of the buildings in Birkenau, and Polish scouts planted religious symbols in the field of Jewish ashes. In short, a Polish crusade began: first for the symmetry of Polish and Jewish fates, and subsequently for Polish primacy in martyrdom. 

The international scandal surrounding the former Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II Birkenau camps lasted for years, and its causes have been only partially removed. (The church of the Mother of God Queen of Poland in Birkenau keeps operating). The scientific literature on this subject is constantly growing, to mention only Jonathan Huener’s “Auschwitz, Poland and the Politics of Commemoration,“ Geneviève Zubrzycki’s “Crosses in Auschwitz” or “From »Shoah« to »Fear«” by Piotr Forecki. The Treblinka Museum operates according to the fait accompli method, apparently counting on irreversibility of its deeds in the event of an international scandal. Above all, however, it is not afraid of being held accountable in Poland. 

Treblinka reconquered 

Denialism in Treblinka is not only a matter of recent years. Yes, the denialist monument standing in the place of the former railway station dates from 2021, but already ten years earlier, Edward Kopówka, together with Paweł Rytel-Andrianik, a priest of the Roman Catholic Church and later a spokesman for the Polish Episcopate, published a volume entitled “Poles from the Treblinka who saved Jews.”  The symmetry of the labor camp and the death camp is just an introduction to the collective moral triumph of Poland and Poles. At that time, Dariusz Libionka’s review in “The Destruction of Jews”, journal of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, in the “Curiosa” section presenting antisemitic publications about the Holocaust, went unnoticed.^[12] And, as far as the chronology is concerned, the denialist stones in the death camp seem to be a consequence of the Jedwabne debate, that is, a matter from the early 2000s. 

Since then, the brochure “Plan of Symbolic Stones” (i.e. stones with the names of Jewish communities that perished in the death camp) has been thwarted by the book “Plan of Symbolic Crosses” dedicated to 296 Polish victims of the labor camp. 216 pages versus 20. Not to mention the persistent advertising of the book about the Jewish Service of Order in the Warsaw ghetto (colloquially called the Jewish police) – where else, if not in Treblinka! – or the publication of poems such as “The Holocaust of Poles” by the Treblinka Museum. Such examples can be multiplied. 

On Treblinka Museum’s first publication’s cover with the new logo, the monument to 900,000 Jews was “simply” removed. Treblinka has been reconquered. 

The monument, to which the Sinti and Roma are rightfully entitled, serves here as a fig leaf in case of accusations against the exclusionary management of the site, since the stubborn fabrication of the ‘Polish camp’ was at the same time the manufacturing of a false symmetry: ‘Polish camp – Jewish camp’. Carried out for years, these doings have remained unpunished. Impunity has led to a situation in which symmetry is no longer sufficient. 

rther field activities and subsequent publications were crowned with the change of the institution’s logo. The “Polish monument” with a cross currently occupies the largest, central part of the Treblinka Museum’s logo. It is modestly flanked by the silhouette of the monument to the memory of the Sinti and Roma from the Treblinka I labor camp and the incongruously miniaturized outline of the Treblinka II death camp monument dedicated to the Jewish victims. On Treblinka Museum’s first publication’s cover with the new logo, the monument to 900,000 Jews was “simply” removed. Treblinka has been reconquered. 

Eldorado Treblinka

Nothing began here with the Poland’s turn toward an authoritarian rule in 2015, because nothing had ended here. The twenty-five years period between the commemoration of both camps (1964) and the transformation of the political system (1989) was only a short break. Today, in Treblinka, we are dealing with the continuation of Polish thieving practices. Capitalizing, this time symbolically, “on Jews” continues. And as in the past, Eldorado Treblinka begins at the railway station. 

Those who profit from the dying and the dead are usually called vultures, jackals and graveyard hyenas in Polish. However, these terms are misleading. Holocaust denial does not occur among animals. Humans have a choice both as individuals and as collective subjects. Poland and Poles can prey on Treblinka’s Jewish victims, but they do not have to. 

The great quantifier comes from the fact that the areas of the former railway station and both camps with adjoining sectors are not a private property of people who do whatever they want, since they can and it is nobody’s business. The Treblinka Museum is a state institution. The practices and artifacts described above are paid for by taxes. It is “we, the Polish nation – all citizens of the Republic of Poland” who symbolically prey on Treblinka’s Jewish victims and symbolically plunder this place. 

The Polish state, regardless of the political orientation in power, so far has been deciding on the use of colossal energy and increasing funds to fight facts and promote antisemitism, although the same forces and resources could have been used to raise awareness of the meaning of the Holocaust and to fight antisemitism, including marking the graves of countless victims of the hunt for Jews, in the vicinity of Treblinka and throughout Poland.^[13] Meanwhile, as in the past, the Eldorado Treblinka is working at full speed. It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change it, we have to change it. 

Translated from the Polish by Bronisława Karst 

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Elżbieta Janicka