Triad teachers learn importance of Holocaust education at Treblinka death camp

TREBLINKA, POLAND (WGHP) — Tucked away deep in a forest of mature pine trees sits an open field covered in tall grass, wildflowers and large rocks. There’s a stillness in the field and a haunting beauty.

“There’s a heaviness to the field knowing that roughly 900,000 people on a 40-acre plot of land were systematically eliminated,” said Andrew Voss of Chestnut Grove Middle School in Stokes County.

Between July 1942 and October 1943, Treblinka death camp functioned as a killing center.

“On every day except Monday, beginning in 1942, a train would arrive down here, which makes it look like tracks. It’s not tracks, and right behind me, there was a train station,” said Fred Guttman, the retired Greensboro rabbi who leads the Holocaust education trips in Poland. “There were pots of flowers, and it looked nice. There were signs, ‘Tickets to the West.’ ‘Tickets to the East.’ Everything to create an illusion that things were OK.”

But in reality, the thousands of Jews deported to Treblinka each day were shaved, stripped and murdered within an hour of arriving. It was an assembly line of death, Guttman said.

“The building had five gas chambers on each side,” Guttman said. “And on the outside, there was a box with a captured Russian tank engine.

The victims were killed in the gas chambers at Treblinka by carbon monoxide.

“Each chamber was approximately 25 square feet by about six feet high. There were fake showers and tiles, and 400 to 500 of us would be crammed into that gas chamber,” Guttman said. “It was so crowded, sometimes people just died standing up.”

“Many people were indifferent. People said they didn’t know. They knew what was happening,” said Hedy Chandler, a second-generation Holocaust survivor. “And indifference is the worst thing. You have to stand up to people.”

Chandler visited Treblinka in honor of her father, Howard. He’s an Auschwitz survivor but lost his mother, sister and brother at Treblinka.

Following a prisoner revolt on Aug. 2, 1943, the Nazis dismantled and destroyed most of the Treblinka death camp and tried to make it look like a normal farm.

“My father has stood here every year for the last 14 years telling everybody his story and how this loss affected him, and this is the hardest place for him to come because there’s nothing,” Chandler said. “Flowers are growing. Butterflies are flying. It doesn’t make sense.”

As life returns to the site where nearly one million Jews and others were murdered, the rocks tell a story that must not be forgotten.

“We have the ability to carry that hope and message to our students, affect the lives of hundreds every single year, tens of thousands in a career,” Voss said. “One educator can touch so many lives. One individual standing up against hate can stop it.”

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