by Matt Deters
Poland is filled with warm, fascinating people and an engrossing culture. However, this country is also very much a graveyard. Beyond battle deaths, almost innumerable over history, World War II’s greatest crimes occurred here. So many of these sites of mass atrocity have been left to nature and time. The country is, in most every way in places, an untended graveyard. In our visit last Thursday to the village of Krynki and then before that in Łódź, we visited Jewish cemeteries that, while spared total demolition, have been left mostly to time. Large vibrant communities that lasted over a century are now just commemorated in overgrown fields with often crumbling graves. These cemeteries give us some sense of the scale of the communities that built them and buried their loved ones in them. As I walked through both of them, I thought about the number and size of all of the other graveyards out there, well tended, causing me to wonder how much resources it actually required to maintain a graveyard. One of our guides suggested that nearly every town in Poland had an old, largely overgrown cemetery in it.
The overgrown Jewish cemetery in Łódź.
In a similar vein, but would otherwise seem to be in an entirely different creature, we visited Treblinka last Wednesday. Its name is famous alongside the other death camps, yet obviously overshadowed by Auschwitz. I knew the Germans had destroyed the bulk of the evidence of their crimes here, leveling the camp and killing all of its prisoners well before the war ended, but even in my imagination I had not imagined its museum would be so spartan. The monument of standing stones was powerful, but still there were questions about whether it was in the “right place.” The recording of communities on the stones was well-done, but still I wonder what more could be done. There’s little left and there’s still ongoing and sometimes conflicting work about what the camp looked like and how exactly it was laid out. However, I would have thought, at least, that the museum would be more robust? The location is far more remote, obviously than in Auschwitz - though Auschwitz still isn’t the easiest place for tourists to access besides hiring a tour. Many of these sites were given little regard - and their Jewish victims not even identified as Jewish until the 1990s.
At the very least, they are building a new museum complex. A competition was held and there's an ongoing project to build a much larger museum and memorial. How many visitors will it receive based on its location? For now, Treblinka seemed to me, then, like the locations in Krynki and Lodz, another mostly untended cemetery. How many other locations scattered around Europe, instrumental to this history and relevant to the people murdered, have been left to rot with time, untended and underdeveloped? Far more than we’re willing to realize if Treblinka is in this state.
The standing stone memorial of Treblinka.
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