The former death camp in Poland known as Treblinka is usually discussed in numbers instead of names. Like Auschwitz, Treblinka was a massive annihilation site during WWII. Unlike Auschwitz, Treblinka was not a slave labor camp where the Nazis took worker photographs and issued prisoners striped uniforms. Treblinka was strictly an extermination center. Its chief purpose was to eliminate new arrivals as quickly as possible. The SS leaders at Treblinka did not take time to mark the incoming masses with numbered tattoos or perform medical experiments. Instead they crafted an extremely efficient killing machine—their pinnacle effort. Few stories in history are as diabolical as the story of Treblinka.
The idea to write Trains to Treblinka advanced while researching my last Nazi Germany book The Lion and the Lamb. In traveling across Europe, working with Holocaust museums and examining original source material, I discovered an astonishing array of eyewitness testimony regarding Adolf Hitler’s extermination centers. Thankfully Treblinka survivors bravely testified at the Dusseldorf trial against their SS captors in 1964–65, thus providing a rich treasure trove of accurate, firsthand historical accounts from which this story is drawn.
Subsequently, all of what you are about to read is a factual retelling from October 1942 to October 1943. Treblinka was a real place, with men, women, and children who experienced the events detailed in this book—real people, real words, real actions. Every person in Trains to Treblinka existed in history, their words are their own, and their experiences are written in chronological sequence. However, this book is a novel by definition because I have included some of their thoughts. My goal was to carefully piece together for the reader a historically precise tale of human survival and insurgency that must never be forgotten.
For me, it is often emotionally difficult to study the fierce details of the Holocaust, but I felt compelled to write Trains to Treblinka so readers of all ages can remember these egregious events. The fascinating people I chose to describe were predominantly young, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two—and one fourteen-year-old—yet all held a central role in the uprising. They are inspiring. Their lives matter to history. Treblinka matters, though it is one of the least familiar concentration camps. We will never know exactly how many human lives were taken from us at Treblinka, but even one life was too many.
The characterizations in this book are my own.
Charles Causey
On the 75th anniversary of the Treblinka revolt