The Goldschmidt Family

Treblinka was a Nazi extermination camp in occupied Poland during World War II near the village of Treblinka in the modern-day Masovian Voivodeship of Poland. The camp, which was constructed as part of Operation Reinhard, operated between July 23, 1942 and October 19, 1943. During this time, approximately 850,000 men, women and children were killed at Treblinka. This figure includes more than 800,000 Jews but also thousands of Romani people.

The camp, which was operated by the SS and Eastern European Trawnikis, consisted of Treblinka I and II. The first camp was a forced-labour center. Inmates worked in either the nearby gravel pit or irrigation area. Between June 1941 and July 23, 1944, more than half of its 20,000 inmates died from execution, exhaustion, or mistreatment.

Treblinka II was designed as a death factory. More than 99% of all arrivals at this site were immediately sent to its gas chambers where they were killed by exhaust fumes from captured Soviet tank engines. The small number who were not killed immediately became Sonderkommandos. These slave labor groups were forced to bury the victims' bodies in mass graves. Later corpses were burned on massive open-air pyres.

Treblinka II ended operations on October 19, 1943 following a revolt by its Sonderkommandos. Several German guards were killed when 300 prisoners escaped. Beginning in March 1942, the SS implemented Sonderaktion 1005 to cover up the murder of millions of people during Aktion Reinhard. Prisoners at Treblinka were formed into Leichenkommandos ("corpse units") that exhumed and cremated the corpses buried in mass graves. Relatively little physical evidence of the camps remains today.