Treblinka travel tips

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Hello and welcome to Beat to Battlefield. This is part of the series in my month-long European tour, which would take me from Poland to Sarajevo, into Greece, through Austria, through Germany, and finishing in Belgium. This month-long tour really helped me to understand much of the history which I've learnt very little about, but now I can gain a lot more and take you on my journeys. I've been a battlefield tour guide now for nearly 20 odd years. It is my hobby, but sometimes it's good to go off on your own and experience more, and to give you some of the travel tips in order to see what's around you, add it on to your own holiday, or perhaps take your own journey to see what there is to see. So at about a week into my journey, I stopped off in the city of Warsaw, the capital of Poland, much of it is a very modern city, and that's because in 1944 it would be completely flattened by the Germans as part of the Warsaw Uprising. I have done several episodes about Warsaw, but it's a city that keeps drawing me back. As with every street you go down, you find a new, richer history. But on this tour I stopped off in Warsaw in order to go to the Traplinka, the concentration camp. Two sides of Traplinka, there were two camps there originally, but I'm getting ahead of myself. How do we get there? Traplinka is located about an hour and a half's train journey away from Warsaw. Now there are two possible stations you'd go to, which look in the show notes and you'll get the exact spellings of these places you need to go to. But located about an hour and a half away is the town of Makina. Makina is located about three miles away from Chablinka. Now, if you're visiting Warsaw or any other larger Polish city, there are people who can do organised tours. But I must remind you that these are fairly expensive, and the way I want to do these podcasts is in order to give you the options for you to travel at a little bit cheaper and experience a little bit more. But if you are going to Malinka and you're not too good on your pins, I'd highly recommend pre-ordering a taxi. When I arrived at the station, there wasn't any taxis, so I decided to walk the three and a half miles towards the Chablinka Def Camp. The pluses of this is you get a lovely view of the local countryside and a real experience of what's going on at that time. You will come across the memorial dedicated to the original train station, which the railway ramp where thousands would come off of it and march their way in to the town of Treblinka and then onto the concentration camp. The town of Trablinka is just a small hamlet with a small set of houses. Then you walk deep into the woods and you'll come to the museum. Sadly, when I arrive there, the museum itself is being renovated, but the start of it will be a museum which you can see and get a full description of the site. And as you walk through this mass site, there are lots of information boards and information in order to tell you how and what happened in this area. Trublinka is made of two concentration camps, the original Trablinka one, which acted from 1941 up until 1944, as the Germans pushed through against the Russians in 1941, they took this land and they would build a labour camp. Attached on the site is a quarry. Like many of the labour camps all throughout Poland, Germany, and Austria, they would use the slave labour to build the raw materials for the war effort. There was a gravel quarry which was worked very hard, and also the local forest would be used to make wood for the crematorium. The site of Trieblinka 1 was mainly Polish political prisoners and Sinti's Romers and also Soviet prisoners, and the large cemetery with a lot of French as well is located at the far end of the site. But the actual first site you come to is Trbinka II. This was the mass extermination site, started in 1942 and would run until October 1943. This site was one of the main blueprints for the mass execution of the Jews of Europe. There is nothing left of the site today. Perhaps a small railway ramp and part of the Red Road. But the site you come to first is the impressive memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. Here, surrounded by many stones standing proud, it lists the towns from all over Europe where people were brought, and within hours of their arrival, they would be turned to dust. It was a massive show that was put on by the Nazis. People would disembark from a train, and then they would be told, after their long journey, they would receive a shower. They would then go to the gas chamber where their bodies would be processed and burnt in mass pits, and also along with the crematorium. It's estimated that between 800,000 and just under a million Jews would be murdered here, as well as 2,000 Sintes and Romers. There would be an uprising on the site in August 1943 when nearly 300 of the inmates were escaped. Just over 200 of them will be recaptured in the days to come after that escape. It is quite an impressive sight to stand at, but please you'll have to use your imagination on what once stood here. There are lots of graphs and lots of diagrams that will show you what once stood here. We then walk along the red road. This road, this cobbled path, takes you along the full length of the site. However, recently much of it has been taped off. Here, some of the graves from a local cemetery, from a Jewish cemetery, were used to make this path. Many of them you can find in parts of the museum. However, recent drone footage and a survey of the site have located there are still remains of those graves within the pathway, and they have still remained there, so the path has been cordoned off. The first big site you come to is the start of the quarry, where quite a lot of Ukrainian guards would watch over those, working day in and day out. Many political prisoners from all over Poland will be brought and worked to death in this horrible site. We then walk further down the path and we come to a clearing in the woods. All over this field you'll see little information posts which will tell you which part of the site you're actually standing on. The site, looked after by Union Ukrainian guards, was located very close to the actual work site, and it even had its own zoo. There was also a large barracks, followed by the large work barracks, very similar to many of the other concentration camps. However, yet again, as this was destroyed in 1944, you need to use a lot of your imagination. As when I went there, the grass was very tall, and you could just make out some of the concrete plimps and where the site once stood. You come out of this site, and you'll come to the other end of the quarry, and this actually gives you an amazing scale of what this site was once like. It's then a case of walking to the cemetery. And it is purely a representation, a memorial, as many of the remains were dug up and destroyed by the Germans in order to cover their tracks. Now, if you're walking the site, you would have walked nearly five kilometres from the museum to the cemetery. When I got there, as I knew I was walking back, I decided I needed to walk a completely different direction, not to cover over where I'd just come from. So it was a case of walking back past Tobinka 1 and walking towards the town of Prostin. This will give you a lovely walk over the open countryside of Poland, and then it's a walk along a main road that will take you to the town of Prostin, which you can get yourself something to eat and something to drink after this long day. As I'm not 100% sure once the museum opens, whether it has a canteen and it will be a very long day for you to wander around. Prostine will take you straight back for a suburban service back to Warsaw. This was one of those trips to go on my bucket list, and I'm so glad I've done it. However, for those who are very new to learning about the Holocaust when it comes to visiting camps and various things like that, it's probably not the best site to go and see. I'd highly recommend that if you're visiting somewhere like Lublin, you could go to Meidannick. When visiting around Germany, Munich, you have Dachau, north of Berlin, you have Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck, in Weimar, we have Mittelbaldora and also the Buchenwald concentration camp. But also, if you have a chance, visit Matthausen. These are some of the several other camps that can be visited, which have larger sites, larger museums, and there's more physical history for you to see. However, my time at visiting the Trubling Camps concentration camp has given me more of an insight into the history of the Holocaust.