Scientific models… cannot tell us all we need to know.
—D1AVID GEORGE HASKELL, THE FOREST UNSEEN
In the middle of eastern Poland, in a clearing among pines, the train track ends. The numbers tell what happened next: between July of 1942 and August of 1943, a mere thirteen months, the Nazis murdered more than nine hundred thousand people here. And the “here” is important: the Nazis chose this place because it was in the middle of nowhere, and they wanted somewhere secret, a place where every person sent there was sent there to die.
But murdering these people—mothers, grandfathers, children clutching favorite stuffed bears—was not enough. The Nazis then tried to erase their lives by burning their bodies, turning human stories to ash. And even that wasn’t enough, because when the Nazis realized that the war would be lost, they attempted to extinguish the story of the camp itself—and they almost got away with it. With the Soviet army steadily advancing, the Nazis razed the buildings, tore up the train tracks, tilled the ground, planted wildflowers and pines, built a farmhouse, and left.
I arrive on a beautiful day in April, thinking that surely I have reached hell on earth. Though at least in the case of Treblinka, hell looks remarkably like a county park, an opening in the forest with closely cropped grass surrounded by the living greenery of pines. I have worn cleats and chased Frisbees on grounds that look like this: bunches of tiny yellow flowers, clumps of greener grass, fallen tan leaves. Outside the boundaries of the former death camp is a small museum, and here in the clearing a single Soviet-era concrete memorial statue surrounded by jagged stones symbolizing the many villages, towns, and cities from which the murdered were taken. But unlike the far more often visited Auschwitz, Treblinka has no barracks remaining, no gas chamber ruins. There is very little to help you imagine what it was like here, which makes it, in many ways, even more terrifying.
Remarkably, for more than sixty years everything we knew about Treblinka came from the testimony of a few survivors, Nazi guards, and a single article by a Soviet journalist who visited the site after the Nazis departed. Then, in 2007, a team led by the British forensic archeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls began the first-ever archeological work on the site. She wanted to find further proof of the Nazi crimes committed here, to help silence those who today deny that Treblinka was anything but the “transit station” the Nazis told their victims it was. She knew that despite the decades that had passed, and despite the Nazis’ best efforts to erase the evidence, “the landscape could never be sanitized in that way.” In large part to respect the actual ground, the team used several new technology-based observation techniques, including LIDAR, a method in which lasers measure the distance between the earth’s surface and a plane overhead, thus essentially stripping away the vegetation to reveal the contours of the naked ground. Sturdy Colls and her colleagues looked for elevations and depressions that might mark the locations of previously unknown mass graves and gas chambers.
Having identified several potential sites in the forest opening, the team made four small excavations. The first two produced some interesting relics, including a fossilized shark’s tooth that revealed that the Nazis had dumped sand from a nearby quarry here to help disguise the ground. But it was in the next two excavations that the team found what they had suspected might be there: a brick wall and foundation. They knew from archival documents and the limited accounts of survivors and witnesses that the only brick buildings in the camp had been the gas chambers. They also found broken orange tiles of the type the Nazis had used on the floor of the gas chamber to further the lie that it was just a Jewish bathhouse, and artifacts such as hairpins, rings, and brooches, some pressed into the earth near what would have been the gas chamber doors. “It’s horrible to think that all you leave behind on earth, to be found seventy years later, is a pendant or a hair clip or an earring,” said Sturdy Colls. “It makes you think if the whole earth of Treblinka was opened up what kind of hell you’d be looking into.”
Before leaving for Poland, I contacted the Dutch archeologist Ivar Schute to find out more about the new archeological techniques being used at Treblinka and elsewhere. Not only does Schute work with Sturdy Colls on her Treblinka project, he also works at Sobibór, another little-known Nazi death camp in eastern Poland that claimed among its 250,000 victims some thirty-five thousand Dutch Jews. In fact, the three extermination camps in eastern Poland—at Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec—were part of the Nazis’ Operation Reinhard, a systematic murdering operation that was incomprehensibly lethal; of the nearly 1.7 million Jews shipped to these camps, barely more than one hundred survived the war.
The overwhelming lack of firsthand testimony, combined with the Nazis’ attempt to erase the evidence of their crimes at the three camps, makes understanding exactly what happened in these hells extraordinarily difficult, he told me. But the new remote-sensing technologies such as LIDAR, along with developments in geophysics, geographic information systems, and digital archeology, are allowing archeologists and historians a much improved understanding of where the murdered took their last steps. In Treblinka, for example, the team found what they suspect are the gas chamber foundations some eighty meters from where historians had thought they must be, and at Sobibór located what they are certain are gas chamber foundations underneath a Soviet-era asphalt parking lot.
The new archeological technologies are also particularly important at these camps because, Schute explained, in addition to the mass graves, “those sites were slaughterhouses, and there were random killings everywhere.” With the mass graves, the burning of bodies, and the random murders, attempting to piece together burial locations is incredibly difficult. Ground-penetrating radar is able to detect changes in the properties of underground materials, producing scans in which, for example, soil looks different than bricks or sand. Another technology, electrical resistivity tomography, already commonly used in oil and gas exploration, gives archeologists yet another way to see into the ground. (At a site in Lithuania they recently used it to discover a long-rumored escape tunnel dug by Jewish prisoners.)
Still, Schute said, while the new technology can help archeologists understand the ground in ways not possible even ten or fifteen years ago, “in the end you still have to dig in some places to really know what it is.” In Sobibór, right beside the gas chambers, he told me, “we found an area with gold teeth and dentures. I think you understand what happened there. A place like that is not a structure, it’s not a building, it just happens inside that camp, and things like that you can only pinpoint in an archeological way. It’s a little weird to map gold teeth, but that’s what you do as an archeologist.”
In Treblinka, Schute explained, “The camp still exists, it’s all there. As an archeologist, the camp is still a place you can visit. There is so much in that soil.” When I asked how far down he and Sturdy Colls had had to dig before they began to find evidence, he says, “Something like fifteen centimeters—it’s directly under the surface.” The Nazis tried to demolish the camp in order to disguise their acts, he said, “but they never thought about archeologists, because in the ground it’s still there.”
At Treblinka, the goal is much less to dig than it is to locate what remains in the ground and to leave it in the ground. Schute described the digging so far at the camp as “test plots of two square meters, not more than that. More like peepholes, you might say.” As much as they found the first time, he told me that there is “lots more to discover yet,” but he expects they will again primarily use noninvasive techniques to pursue their goal. “Look,” he said, “it’s kind of a sacred ground.”
I asked what he meant. “That’s difficult to answer. Because of my work I come across human remains, and I deal with lots of families of the victims. I also spoke with the survivors, so it’s quite difficult to be unmoved by that. My whole perception of those places is highly influenced by those contexts. You have to be careful, because digging is destroying, and after you’ve dug it out, it’s not there anymore.”
Another person whom I spoke with before leaving the States was Shiri Sandler, director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. A cheerful, serious woman in her early thirties, Sandler comes from a family of Holocaust survivors and has been to eastern Poland dozens of times—though, she told me, “Treblinka I’ve only been to once, thank God.” We sat in the museum’s conference room, its windows overlooking New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty in the distance.
Auschwitz has become the symbol of the Holocaust, she told me, because it was so enormous and so many people died there, but also because it was a place that people could survive. “You couldn’t survive Treblinka, and so we don’t know what it was like,” she explained. “It’s impenetrable. It’s lost. I had family in Treblinka, and the idea that this is a space that erased these people completely, in a way that Auschwitz didn’t, that’s really horrifying.”
I asked, Can we ever imagine what it must really have been like? “I think we all do it,” she replied, “but I don’t think we can ever actually do it. We could in theory understand what it feels like to put your foot down one after the other between the ramp at Auschwitz, or the ramp at Treblinka, and the gas chamber. We can understand what it feels like to walk that distance. But we would never understand what it feels like to be starving while doing it, to have the terror while doing it, to have been separated from your child, your parents, to be beaten, to smell the smoke. We cannot access that. And yet of course we try. My old boss used to say you’re not a scholar at Auschwitz, you’re not a doctor, not a lawyer—you’re a person, you’re a parent, you’re a child—it breaks down everything else. And so we’re always going to be putting ourselves in their shoes, but we’re never going to do it correctly.”
I wondered too, to deal with the horror, whether we sometimes imagine that those who suffered the Holocaust weren’t really like us. “Every once in a while it hits me, the reality of what it must have felt like for my grandmother to lose every single person she had loved in the world,” she said, “and that’s just simply too much. We can’t imagine that kind of loss. Our brains can’t comprehend it, so we think it must have felt different. They must have loved their children less, or their hunger didn’t feel like what we think hunger feels like. We think that somehow it didn’t feel for them like it would feel for us, when in fact it was exactly what it would feel like for us.”
On the day of my Treblinka visit, my guide Josef has already taken me to the sites in the Polish capital where the last Warsaw Ghetto fighters were entombed, the Germans burying them in the rubble. And the hospital site where the Germans killed all the staff and then blew up the building, burying five hundred patients in concrete. We have visited the deportation site where the Germans shoved Jewish families onto cattle cars and sent them east. And we have driven for what seems like hours. As we get closer to Treblinka, the road begins to twist and disintegrate. Even in our comfortable van we must slow, and turning in to the forest we slow further still. As we draw near, the forest becomes individual trees, and I wonder whether any of those I see were here back then.
We park at the small museum and see Jewish gravestones used by the Germans to pave dirt roads, and a diorama of the camp showing naked bodies burning on the railroad-tie grill. A handful of photos line the walls: the steam shovels used to dig mass graves and later to dig up the bodies to be burned, the Polish Jewish doctor—Janusz Korczak—who cared for orphaned children in Warsaw and chose to die with them here. There is a color print drawing of a young girl holding a songbird upside down, dead in her hand. And there is a young girl’s voice, maybe the daughter of the Polish woman who took our entrance fee, echoing through the rooms. As we stand by the diorama, Josef tells me that Treblinka is where he stopped believing in God. “If he is Almighty and he allowed this to happen, he has a twisted sense of humor and I prefer not to believe in him.”
And then we begin walking.
Walking is the way to approach the site, your feet on the ground. We pass the opening in the trees marking the boundary of the camp, six-foot-high stones placed fifty meters apart showing where the barbed-wire fence would have been. We pass the stone marker telling the camp’s story in Polish and English, saying the memorial was created between 1959 and 1964, and I think, So this site stood empty for fifteen years after the war, just a clearing in the forest where the devil had lived for a year.
I will never forget the quiet. Josef says I am lucky there are not busloads of Israeli tourists, that I am lucky to be alone. And I agree—this is what I wanted. But I think too of Shiri’s words, that we are always alone when we visit these sites. No one can experience this for us. Next we walk without talking to where train tracks lay. The wind in the pines, our boots on the gravel path. And all around are sounds I do not hear—no constant rush from a distant highway, no jets passing over, no radios or televisions, no sounds from what the world has become. Back then, though, it must have been so loud.
“Of course,” says Josef. “There were thousands of people, and the dogs of the guards, and the shooting to the air or shooting to the people. The train was going in and out. The crying of the kids and the screaming of the women.” He pauses, “And the smell probably was horrible.”
When we reach the train platform, the path turns to cobblestone, the stones with their multitudes of shapes, their rusts and grays, greens and blacks. It looks like the memory of milling feet—here had stood hundreds of thousands of people, having just stepped off the train, once again under the sky, between rows of pines, trying to make sense of where they were. They were on earth, still, for a little more time. And maybe here is where they were closest to what they had been, for the last time. Here, these embedded stones mark the place where these people still wore clothes from home, the men still in ties, the children in their best shoes, the women brushing hair from their eyes.
The long stone platform merges into a walkway, and this is where the people left the disembarkation platform and entered the camp. The large Soviet-made mushroom-shaped monument looms over the center of the site, and the jagged shards of stone rise from paved ground. I stand thinking that here is where so many others once stood, having just arrived, scared, not knowing what will happen next. Josef says he will wait for me here, that I can walk around the site, and so I enter alone.
Treblinka was a murder factory, a dis-assembly line designed with ruthless efficiency and thoroughness. Jews arrived in train cars, mainly cattle cars, having been told they were being resettled to Ukraine farms, many having spent days packed so tightly they had to stand. To further the deception, the Nazis built the train platform to look normal, complete with a fake ticket window and signs pointing directions to various cities. A small orchestra sometimes played. Upwards of twenty thousand people were “processed” through each day.
We barely know what happened at Treblinka. Nine hundred thousand people were murdered on this small spot of ground, and we will never know all their names, never have their bodies to bury. Our best record of what took place comes from the Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman and his twelve-thousand-word article that begins, “Let us walk through the circles of the Hell of Treblinka.”
From the train platform the people were herded through the camp gates and onto a large square, three to four thousand at a time. The women and children were ordered into the barracks to undress. “Love—maternal, conjugal, or filial love—told people that they were seeing one another for the last time,” Grossman writes. But they were hurried along by the SS. The women had their hair cut. The men were told to undress quickly and stack their clothes neatly. A terrible stench was in the air, and the smell of lime chloride. One of the few survivors of Treblinka remembered a young woman asking how long it would take. Ten minutes, she was told. Looking around she said—as though to the world, to this life—“Farewell.”
Now the naked people were ordered to give up their valuables, their identity cards, money, wedding rings, earrings, jewelry. Now the guards tore wedding rings from fingers, ripped earrings from lobes. Anything deemed valuable for the German war effort was saved, the rest of the documents tossed away as trash. Back in the empty square their belongings were being rifled through, everything of value to be sent to Germany, everything else buried or burned.
Now the naked people were ordered into a column five persons across and marched down an alley 120 meters long and two meters wide, barbed wire on either side, and lined with SS men. This is the path the Nazis called die Himmelstrasse, “the Road to Heaven.” Grossman reports that this path was “sprinkled with white sand, and those who were walking in front with their hands in the air could see on this loose sand the fresh imprint of bare feet: the small footprints of women, the tiny footprints of children.… This faint trace in the sand was all that remained of the thousands of people who had not long ago passed this way, who had walked down this path just as the present contingent of four thousand people was now walking down it.”
The walk took about a minute. When they saw the gas chamber doors, the people stopped in astonishment, until the Nazis drove them through using rifle butts, biting dogs, lead pipes. There are stories of resistance—a young man stabbing an SS officer, a young woman grabbing a gun and killing two of the SS. Stories of mothers protecting their infants, their children. Stories of peasants in the nearest village escaping into the forest to get away from the women’s screams.
Most of the victims were dead within twenty minutes, with the children lasting longest. Any survivors were shot. A team of workers armed with dental pliers then pulled the gold from the victims’ mouths, and the naked bodies were dumped into a mass grave.
In the winter of 1942–43, the Nazis began to burn the bodies of the murdered. They also dug up the previously buried and burned these too. After struggling with the logistics of how to burn so many human bodies, they settled on digging an enormous pit some 250 meters long, 20 meters wide, 6 meters deep. Over this pit they placed a grill made of railroad ties. At night, in surrounding villages, the flames could be seen above the pines. In the daytime, the ashes of the bodies were taken out of the camp and dumped in the woods. Local peasants were forced to load their carts and scatter the ashes on the road leading away from the camp. Children were made to spread the ashes more evenly with spades; car wheels made “a peculiar swishing sound on this road.”
In the autumn of 1943, having done their best to hide the hell they had created, the Nazis left. Grossman arrived about a year later, describing a quiet scene with the pine trees along the railroad tracks “barely stirring. It is these pines, this sand, this old tree stump that millions of human eyes saw as their freight wagons came slowly up to the platform.”
And then he describes the earth’s surface…
… casting up fragments of bone, teeth, sheets of paper, clothes, things of all kinds… half-rotted shirts of those who were murdered, their trousers and shoes, their cigarette cases that have turned green, penknives, shaving brushes, candlesticks, a child’s shoes with red pompoms, embroidered towels from the Ukraine, lace underwear, scissors, thimbles, corsets, and bandages. Photographs of children from Warsaw and Vienna, letters penciled in a childish scrawl, hundreds of perfume bottles of all shapes and sizes—green, pink, blue… and thousands of little forest flies are crawling about over all these half-rotted bits and pieces.… We walk on over the swaying, bottomless earth of Treblinka and suddenly come to a stop. Thick wavy hair, gleaming like burnished copper, the delicate lovely hair of a young woman, trampled into the ground.
Seventy years later, I stand looking down, wondering whether this is that spot. I think of the bodies burning day and night. I think of the carts filled with ash. I try to figure where the so-called Road to Heaven was, knowing that somewhere nearby is ground that supported the nine hundred thousand murdered as they walked their last steps. Though I have been assured by Shiri and others that walking here is okay, it feels almost disrespectful. Because the bodies are nowhere, they are everywhere.
When you go to Auschwitz and Birkenau, of course it is terrible, but in a different way, because of the barracks and photographs of victims and gas chamber ruins. Here, there is almost nothing. Even the jagged stone markers seem to have risen from the earth of their own accord. At Auschwitz, I connected with two photographs, one of a Polish writer staring defiantly at the camera who was my age when he was murdered. And the other of a thirteen-year-old girl with tears in her eyes, just months before she died. I imagined lying on the barracks bunks on a frozen winter night, and I imagined walking down the ramp into the gas chambers, which are left as they were after SS dynamite. I imagined stepping off the cattle car that remains at the selection point. Of course you can’t know what it was like, but the buildings and ruins and photographs help your imagination along.
At Treblinka, there is little help. In the middle of the forest clearing lies a long rectangle of black stones in a slight depression in the ground, a monument to the pyre where the Germans burned the bodies day after night. The grass around the memorial is worn to dirt from visitors’ feet. But there are no words inscribed, no photos, just black rocks that disturbingly resemble charred remains. And here is where my imagination fails. Now, dear brain, I would like you to imagine hundreds or even thousands of naked human bodies roasting—it’s said women burned more easily than men because of their larger fat stores, the stomach of pregnant women would finally burst, spilling the fetus—imagine this, please, imagine the hiss and splat of bodies split, of fat falling into flames, the stink and stench of burning flesh, the blackest smoke. I’m asking you to imagine hell as you stand at the memorial’s edge, and you are saying, No, I’m sorry, I can’t. Or perhaps it is No, I refuse.
What’s it like to walk at Treblinka? I only know what it was like for me, early on a spring afternoon, a warm sunny day. And I know it is where, more than any place I had been, I had a sense of sacred ground. I say this not feeling certain that it has much to do with “sacred places” as defined for us by others—a cathedral, for example. And that maybe anywhere we call sacred ground has as much to do with mystery as it does with being sure.
“Though we may often be told to ‘look up’ to find God… the truth of creation is that God is near… in the soil beneath our feet,” writes Norman Wirzba, professor of Theology, Ecology, and Agrarian Studies at Duke Divinity School. When I return from Poland, I look him up and ask him about sacred ground.
When we use religious language, he tells me, “that doesn’t necessarily mean that we know what we mean. Because to enter into the ground is precisely to enter into the unknown. But we end up going in the direction of religious language because the reductive, scientific terms that we have just aren’t up to the task.” It’s a sentiment I have heard from the best of scientists, an appreciation that while science with its methods and models can help us comprehend the world and what’s happening to it, science cannot, as the biologist David George Haskell writes in his beautiful book The Forest Unseen, “tell us all we need to know.” All the digging in the world, all the latest technological tools, will only tell us so much about the ground of Treblinka. There is something there that cannot be scanned or measured, and yet no doubt exists.
How then to make sense of the experience of being there?
“In the context of that kind of incomprehension,” Wirzba tells me, “the only really responsible reaction is a kind of humility that is steeped in acknowledgment, and the role of a human being as a witness to something that exceeds our power of understanding.” It’s the role, he says, that asks of us attention, respect, gratitude, and celebration. And it is the opposite of a human being who is, in his words, “divorced from” and “bored with” the true sources of sustenance. It is the same way, he explains, that rather than appreciate the mystery and priceless importance of the natural world, we are given “virtual worlds in which you couldn’t be bored, because the explosions keep getting more spectacular.”
This reminds me of my choice of the word “ground,” as opposed to “earth” or “land.” It’s as though we have become bored, I tell him, with the ground at our feet. What is there to be amazed by, or wonder at? “Ground” is a word that is almost like a disguise, because it’s so plain. And yet…
“Everything depends on the ground,” he jumps in. “It seems to me that in our culture, we’re at a loss to know how to determine the significance of anything.” In order to help his students to understand, as he says, “the soil as the ground of signification,” Wirzba gives them the semester-long assignment to grow a plant. Many of them haven’t got a clue how to do this. “They’ve never touched soil, and it’s amazing to see the transformation that happens when they really have that aha moment when they recognize how soil is this complex living reality,” he says. “We don’t know if soil is an organism or a matrix or what-the-heck-is-this-thing, and yet when we put seed into it, it can support life.”
For students, Wirzba tells me, this experience then becomes “the basis for being able to talk about the value and significance of things that is real in a way that just reading about them isn’t.” And that, having had this kind of experience, “people can come to the sense that a place is sacred, or ground is sacred, because they begin to see how the power of life that makes their life possible is at work here.”
This is what happened for me at Treblinka, and it’s a feeling that has grown since that time. I have come to believe that whatever is sacred is that which inspires in us an understanding of the connections that matter. I mean the connections that sustain us. I mean the connections—the web of relationships—that keep us alive. The power of Treblinka is that in being there you have the opportunity to be stripped bare and helped to realize your connections with other human beings. You know that on this ground people were literally stripped bare, stripped of everything, until the one thing that was left were the bonds between lover and loved. Husband, wife, father, mother, child. This is something no Nazi hell could break, and perhaps the “it” that no technology will ever discover.