Quotes About Treblinka

Aloïs Hudal was an Austrian native, an anti-Semite, and a fervent Nazi. He used his position as rector of the Pontificio Santa Maria dell'Anima, the German seminary in Rome, to help hundreds of SS officers escape justice, including Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka.

In the same way, we tried to be counted as political prisoners so that we wouldn't be put into a Jewish work camp. We knew that the Jewish work camp meant the end. The absolute end. We knew that. Although it was scanty, there was information about those camps. Then while we were being transported, we only hoped that we weren't going to Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Majdanek—camps that were already notorious.

The Nazis understood how useful it was to prevent the camp guards from identifying with the prisoners, to emphasize the otherness, the difference of the people whom the boxcars brought to Sobibor and Treblinka.

As we know from Richard Glazar's story, 24,000 Bulgarians – those who had been in Salonika – did die in Treblinka in the spring of 1943; but there can be little doubt that the 25,000 Jews of Sofia were saved by the intervention of the future Pope and the courage of a king.

There were various things which were absolutely essential to survival: it was essential to fill oneself completely with a determination to survive; it was essential to create in oneself a capacity for dissociating oneself to some extent from Treblinka; it was important not to adapt completely to it. Complete adaptation, you see, meant acceptance. And the moment one accepted, one was morally and physically lost.

Cultures of memory are organized by round numbers, intervals of ten; but somehow the remembrance of the dead is easier when the numbers are not round, when the final digit is not a zero. So within the Holocaust, it is perhaps easier to think of 780,863 different people at Treblinka: where the three at the end might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after they were gassed,

Even though the Underground then spread news of Treblinka, some people argued the Nazis wouldn't visit the same bestiality on a city as important as Warsaw.