Top Photo: Photo of Treblinka uprising from a distance by Polish train station worker Franciszek Ząbecki.

In just 18 months, the Nazis murdered 865,000 people at Treblinka.[1] Unlike forced labor camps like Majdanek, Mauthausen, or even Auschwitz, where groups were kept alive to work for the Third Reich, Treblinka was set aside as one of three specially designed death camps. Though a small group of prisoners were temporarily kept alive to help operate the killing facility, even this group was “liquidated” and replaced at frequent intervals. Everyone else went straight into gas chambers to be murdered by carbon monoxide shortly after arriving. 

On August 2, 1943, however, a group of temporary prisoners staged a revolt against their oppressors. They set fire to the camp, killed and wounded several guards, and many escaped into the nearby forests. Although half were recaptured and killed, and an unknown number did not survive the war, some who escaped did live to tell their stories after the war ended. Because of their courage and bravery, we now know quite a bit about Treblinka and the mass murder carried out there. 

Because the Nazis tried to conceal their activities at camps like Treblinka, we know far less about places that had no revolts. For example, at the Bełżec death camp, where nearly 450,000 were murdered, there was no uprising; we know of only two survivors, rendering the victims’ perspective of the camp a veritable black hole.[2] Given these facts, the story of the Treblinka uprising is not simply one where a group targeted as victims took matters into their own hands—it underscores the long-term power of survival in fighting back against forces bent not only on mass murder, but complete erasure.

Operation Reinhard

During World War II, the Nazis set out to eliminate the Jews of Europe, along with other groups they deemed “undesirable.” Following the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, German forces rounded up millions of Jews and confied them into more than 1,000 ghettos across occupied Poland. The largest of the ghettos was in Warsaw, and with 400,000 Jewish people crammed into a just a few blocks of the city, conditions deteriorated rapidly as disease, malnutrition, and starvation became widespread. From 1939 to 1941 across all the ghettos, tens of thousands died.

On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history. With conditions in the ghettos becoming untenable, SS leader Heinrich Himmler gave a verbal order (no doubt on Adolf Hitler’s command) to create Einsatzgruppen, or “Special Squads,” whose job was to follow the advancing Wehrmacht and round up and shoot any Jews they found during the invasion. The ensuing “Holocaust by Bullets” claimed between 1.5 million and 2 million Jewish lives.

Yet, in late 1941, Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, another high-ranking Nazi, began to consider the mass shootings untenable, wasteful, and potentially even harmful to the Germans carrying out the crimes. At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, the Nazis formally implemented what they called the Endlösung, or “Final Solution”—the construction of specially designed death camps where the millions still residing in ghettos would be transported to and murdered using poison gas.

These new death camps, named Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, were built between March and July 1942. Unlike other camps familiar to the popular imagination (where selections were made at the ramp), in most cases, the mass killing process at Treblinka made no distinction between healthy and sick, old and young, male and female. Everyone was sent to the gas chambers and killed. Dubbed Operation Reinhard for Heydrich—a principal architect of the Holocaust who was assassinated in June 1942—the killing spree that occurred at these “Reinhard camps” was staggering: by the end of 1943, the Nazis had murdered approximately 1.6 million people at these three locations alone.[3]

At Treblinka

The majority of Treblinka’s victims came from the Warsaw Ghetto. In July 1942, the Nazis began deporting Jews from there to Treblinka, promising the weary ghetto population that they were being sent “East” to be “resettled.” Packed into cramped cattle cars, the starving Warsaw Ghetto Jews were given bread and jam and even encouraged to pack luggage to take with them. The train station built at the Treblinka camp was disguised to look like a real station, with fake signage, ticket windows, and even a clock with painted-on hands. As Jews disembarked, Nazi officers told them they needed to be deloused before being forwarded on to their final destinations, and that Treblinka was a delousing camp. Forced to undress, the naked men, women, and children were hustled along a winding path that led to as many as 10 gas chambers disguised as a public bathing facility where they were murdered.[4] 

Treblinka Camp in Spring 1943. Map courtesy of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

The only people spared from immediate death were 600 to 1,000 Jews (mainly younger males or those in highly skilled trades), kept alive to help “run” the camp. About 300 worked unloading the dead from the gas chambers, burying them, and later, when the decision was made to burn bodies, digging up corpses and carrying out the incineration process. Another group sorted the massive amounts of belongings victims had brought with them to the Treblinka so that the items could be sent back to Germany. A third group ran the unloading area and helped Jews disembark trains and go through the undressing areas. There were a few other smaller groups that had more privileges and spatial freedom, most notably the Tarnungskommando (Camouflage Unit), which worked to cover the fences with tree branches, and the Hofjuden (Court Jews), who were craftsmen or professionally trained men with special skills needed to maintain the camp.

Every prisoner in these groups would be murdered and “replaced” with new arrivals every few weeks, with the exception of specific individuals, usually from the Hofjuden, who were kept alive because their expertise. In fact, one’s fate was often denoted in the color of striped band on their uniform—red given to short term workers in the killing and sorting areas, blue to the unloading group, and yellow to skilled workers.[5] 

The Revolt

In late 1942 or early 1943, a group of Jewish prisoners, likely spearheaded by several from the Hofjuden, realized the only way out of Treblinka was through death, escape, or fighting back. They knew the risks. As Treblinka survivor Yankiel Wiernik remembered, a fellow prisoner named Kuszer once launched a solo revolt, attacking and wounding a German guard. When the camp leader arrived, Wiernik recalled, he “dismissed all the workmen, and other members of the camp were massacred on the spot in the most fiendish manner with blunt tools.”[6]

Despite the danger, a secret committee of Wiernik and others met when they could, often when everyone else in the bunk had gone to sleep at night. They coordinated with other camp prisoners to get more people involved in a larger revolt plan. Wiernik wrote: “All of this involved considerable risk because of the watchfulness of the guards and strong fortifications of the camp. However, ‘freedom or death’ was our motto.”[7]

Undoubtedly, this group was inspired by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which occurred in April 1943. There, a group of Jews resisted transportation to Treblinka by building fortifications, smuggling in weapons, and launching an all-out assault on the Nazis when they arrived to deport them. In the process, hundreds of Germans were killed and injured, and although thousands of the revolting Jews were also killed and the ghetto razed to the ground, the gauntlet of defiance had been thrown down. 

Afterwards, the 42,000 people remaining in the ghetto were sent to Treblinka, where they undoubtedly told the prisoners there of the heroic deeds in Warsaw. Treblinka survivor Samuel Rajzman later reflected: “The news came to us in very scant amounts about the Warsaw ghetto uprising, but it gave us a lot of courage to undertake our work. Just as the Warsaw ghetto uprising undertook a hopeless fight only to avenge, at least in a small part, this enormous harm of the martyrdom of the Jewish nation, so we in Treblinka were convinced that Treblinka must cease to exist once and for all.”[8]

By late spring of 1943, transports to Treblinka began to slow as the ghettos of Poland emptied. Wiernik noticed that the task of burying and burning bodies had also reached about 75 percent completion.[9] Fearful that a mass liquidation of camp personnel was coming, the prisoner committee selected June 15 as the date for the revolt. According to Wiernik, “we began to organize in groups of five, each group being assigned to a specific task such as: the wiping out of the German and Ukrainian garrison, setting the buildings on fire, covering the escape of the inmates, etc. All the necessary paraphernalia was being prepared: blunt tools to kill our keepers, lumber for the construction of bridges, benzine for setting fires, etc.”[10] The groups also acquired weapons—guns and even grenades—by forging a key for the German weapon arsenal kept at Treblinka. There is even evidence to suggest weapons were smuggled in from local partisan units who contacted Jewish prisoner details working to gather sticks for the camouflage unit.[11]

The June 15 revolt had to be scrubbed at the last minute, however; the opportunities needed to launch the revolt never presented themselves. Subsequent dates were selected and scratched as well. The challenges of planning such an attack were numerable. One of the biggest was trying to communicate between the different groups of prisoners scattered throughout Treblinka. The 300 workers in the Totenlager portion of the camp—the area of the camp with the gas chambers, burial pits, and burning grates—were separated from other groups of Jewish prisoners. Coordination with the other 700 Jews of Treblinka, therefore, had to be carried out carefully. People like Wiernik became critical in this process because his role as a carpenter meant he could traverse Treblinka fairly freely. As he noted, “I was being watched less than the others and treated better. Time and again, the Ukrainian guards entrusted some of their possessions for safekeeping with me knowing that I would not be searched.”[12] It was in this same manner that he was able to contact and coordinate with Jewish prisoners scattered throughout other portions of the camp. 

Another “mainstay” of the planning committee was a Jewish man named Alfred Galewski, an engineer who had similar freedom of movement. In a series of conversations with Galewski late in July, Wiernik confirmed that Monday, August 2, became the “definite, irrevocable date for the outbreak of the revolt.”[13] Mondays were usually rest days around Treblinka, and since it was very hot that particularly morning, a number of German and Ukrainian guards left the camp to cool off with a swim in the nearby Bug River. The prisoners seized the moment to launch their revolt. There was supposed to be a signal alerting the start of the uprising around 5:00 p.m., but about an hour before, some prisoners feared the plot had been discovered by a German guard named Kurt Küttner. As Rajzman recalled: 

At 3:45 p.m., we heard the long-anticipated shot at the main gate of our barracks. Strong detonations of exploding grenades followed and in the same second, the men of my group, who were in possession of weapons, immediately took their posts. The first shot was fired from the rifle of comrade Monk from Warsaw, who aimed at the Ukrainian watchman leaving him dead on the spot. The Ukrainians were surprised by the incident, even more so as our entire group ran yelling ‘hurray’ at the torturers. The grenades detonated immediately, and the entire area of the northern camp became a rolling cauldron of smoke and flames.[14] 

The Jews killed several guards and destroyed the main gate and some fences, allowing around 300 to make it across the antitank obstacles and ditches to escape into the forests. The guards were able to get to the machine guns mounted on the watchtowers, however, (probably as a result of the early start of the revolt) and many of the prisoners were killed during the chaos of the revolt. Additionally, the telephone lines were not severed, and so German reinforcements responded quickly. Because of this, between half and two-thirds of those who managed to escape during the revolt were recaptured and killed.[15]

Of those who managed to evade recapture, 50 to 70 survived until the end of the war. Beyond giving voice to the victims’ lived experience of Treblinka, the revolt was also important for the agency it gave back to those participating in it. To quote Rajzman, “With our hearts overflowing with joy, we looked at the clouds of smoke rising from the burning place where our brothers, our disgraced and tormented sisters, wives, and mothers were executed, and where thousands of our innocent children were martyred. Treblinka has disappeared from the face of the earth.”[16]

Aftermath

What role the revolt played in shuttering Treblinka is uncertain. However, the last mass killings there took place just a few weeks after the revolt, and soon thereafter, the Germans moved to close the camp, a task completed by November 1943. As the war turned against Nazi Germany after their defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk, Nazi leaders decided to dismantle and deconstruct all of the Reinhard camps. Though the Final Solution would continue during this period at newly constructed killing facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau (where another 1.1 million were murdered), by early 1944, Operation Reinhard had ended and the three Reinhard camps ceased to exist. 

Researchers’ best estimates put the entire number of Operation Reinhard camp survivors at 150 people. And though current research suggests that number was higher and that escape attempts were common, there is no question that the largest groups of these survivors came from prisoner revolts like the one at Treblinka (and a similar one that followed two months later in Sobibór). The mass killings of Operation Reinhard—indeed, the dark heart of the Holocaust—would likely have been largely erased if not for those who found a way to revolt, escape, and survive.