A Concentration Camp? by Lisa Tetrault

The scale of the killing at Treblinka – the Nazi Concetration Camp outside Warsaw visited yesterday – defies comprehension—as well as its name. 

The facts are clear enough.  Designed to gas and kill 6,000 people in just under two hours.  A system the Nazis had scaled up through clear-eyed experimentation.  The trains rolled in throughout the day.    6000 people every few hours disembarking and walking straight into a mass death.   Over and over.   All day long.  All week long.  All month long.   For years.   

 Then came the burn pits—to clear the ever-mounting body count.   The Nazis systematically piling  women on the bottom  because of their higher fat content.  Men in the middle.  Children on top.   This  produced fires with the purest ash and least remains. 

I hadn’t appreciated the productivity of the death fields, and I feel a bit deceived by my education.  Nazi internment camps, which were the centerpiece of my understanding, hold no candle to the death “camps”—-a word that seems wholly inadequate for what these places were.   

No one arrived  there to stay. eking out an existence, however meager.   Or dressed in striped pajamas.  These were something else entirely.   Something that defies description., even as the facts are clear. 

But nothing about the facts seems compatible either.    I imagine the chaos, panic, and terror among the people arriving.  The noise.  And I can’t reconcile how in the midst of such human desperation—pleas and pained acts of love—another set of humans could simultaneously respond with  such a cooly-calculated search for mechanical efficiency. 

The layers upon layers of the Holocaust’s meaning expand for me every day—so many things I never understood.   I could write volumes.  But for some reason tonight, I can’t get past this dissonance.