On 2 August 1943, the prisoners of the Treblinka extermination camp staged an armed revolt. They killed several SS guards, seized weapons, set fire to the camp’s buildings, and around 200 of them broke out and ran for the surrounding forests. Most of the escapers were tracked down and killed by German pursuit forces over the following days. Around 70 reached the partisans or hid successfully and survived to liberation. The revolt did not save the prisoners who carried it out. It did force the SS to dismantle the camp earlier than they had planned, and it produced the survivor witnesses without whom the world would know almost nothing of what happened at Treblinka.
The camp
Treblinka was the second largest extermination camp after Auschwitz. It operated from July 1942 to October 1943. Around 800,000 Jews were murdered there, most of them from the Warsaw ghetto and the smaller ghettos of central Poland, plus around 50,000 Roma. The camp had no labour function. Each transport arriving by train was processed through the gas chambers within an hour or two of arrival. The bodies were initially buried in mass graves and then, from spring 1943, exhumed and burned on improvised pyres to destroy the evidence.
The permanent prisoner population was around 700 men, divided between the lower camp where new arrivals were processed and the upper camp where the gas chambers and the burning pyres operated. The prisoners were classified by job. The men who handled new arrivals worked in the undressing rooms, the haircutting station, the property sorting warehouses. The men who worked in the upper camp were the death camp Sonderkommando, handling the bodies. Each group was kept separate from the other; the SS did not want them comparing what they knew.
The plan
The revolt was planned over several months by an underground group within the prisoner population. The leadership included Dr Julian Chorazycki, a Jewish physician, and after his suicide following a security incident in April 1943, the engineer Galewski took over. The plan was to acquire weapons from the camp armoury, which one of the prisoners had access to as a craftsman, and to launch a coordinated assault on a chosen day. The signal would be a grenade thrown at a specific moment in the early afternoon when most of the SS were at lunch.
The plan was complicated. Several conspirators were lost in security incidents during the planning. The date was set for early August. Weapons were duplicated using a copied key to the armoury, with substitutions made so that the missing weapons would not show up on inventory. By the morning of 2 August, the conspirators held around 25 rifles, 20 grenades, and small quantities of pistols and ammunition.
The day
The plan went partly wrong from the start. A grenade went off prematurely. The SS realised something was happening before the full assault could be coordinated. The prisoners attacked anyway. They killed several SS men and Ukrainian guards, set fire to the wooden buildings of the lower camp including the sorting warehouses, and rushed the perimeter fence. Around 300 of the approximately 700 prisoners in the camp at the moment of the revolt got across the wire.
The German pursuit was immediate and well-resourced. SS units, Wehrmacht troops in the area, and Ukrainian auxiliaries searched the surrounding forests for the next several days. Most of the escapers were captured and shot. Some were betrayed by local Polish villagers; some were hidden by other Polish villagers. The death toll among the escapers was around two-thirds. Around 70 men survived the immediate hunt and reached either partisan units or sympathetic Polish farmers. Of those, around 70 ultimately survived to liberation in 1945.
The aftermath
The revolt destroyed parts of the camp infrastructure but did not stop the killing. The remaining prisoners were forced to continue with the burning of the bodies for another two months. By October 1943 the work was essentially complete. The SS shot the remaining prisoners, dismantled the camp buildings, and planted the site with trees. They returned the land to a local Ukrainian farmer with instructions to maintain it as ordinary farmland. Treblinka, when Soviet troops arrived in 1944, looked like a field. Only the foundations of the buildings, found by Soviet investigators, gave any indication of what had been there.
The survivors
The Treblinka survivors are the only reason the camp’s operation is documented in detail. Several of them, particularly Yankel Wiernik (who wrote A Year in Treblinka while still in hiding in Warsaw in 1944), Samuel Willenberg, Richard Glazar, and Chil Rajchman, gave detailed testimony about the camp’s layout, its operation, and the men who ran it. Their accounts cross-reference with each other and with the partial German records and the post-war Polish forensic investigation of the site. Together they constitute the documentary basis on which the figure of 800,000 Treblinka dead rests.
Without the revolt and its 70 survivors, Treblinka might have left almost no record at all. The other Operation Reinhard camps, Bełżec and Sobibor, produced one and around 50 survivors respectively. Bełżec, where around 600,000 Jews were murdered, has only one substantial survivor account, that of Rudolf Reder. The figure of one survivor against 600,000 dead is not a statistical anomaly. It is what the SS were aiming for everywhere. They almost achieved it at Treblinka. They were prevented by the men who fought their way out on 2 August 1943.
Sources
- Yankel Wiernik, A Year in Treblinka, American Representation of the General Jewish Workers’ Union of Poland, 1945
- Samuel Willenberg, Surviving Treblinka, Blackwell, 1989
- Richard Glazar, Trap with a Green Fence, Northwestern University Press, 1995
- Chil Rajchman, Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory 1942-1943, Quercus, 2011
- USHMM: Treblinka