Nobody at Treblinka

Thomas Carper

Sie waren nicht ein kleiner Mann - film director Claude Lanzmann to a former Nazi official

But keep the scale in mind. What single man Could undertake that kind of enterprise When each day trains from half of Europe ran Into the camp? The prisoners swarmed like flies Onto the platforms. Hundreds did their jobs Of keeping books, processing and selecting, Or guarding work brigades, or moving mobs Into the chambers... cleaning... disinfecting. You see, with those large numbers, no one said, 'X' is responsible... We were a team. Handling the hordes... the living, and the dead. Mine was a minor function. Do I seem Like someone who would cause such sufferings? I was a nobody. Nobody does those things.

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: SS garage, with inspection pit: Treblinka.

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, so I'm breaking my own posting rule.

This is Belzec, Poland.

Vigilance and Respect.

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits was taken at Sobibor, Poland.

It shows French Jews in the camp at Drancy, on the outskirts of Paris, where they were forcibly interned prior to being sent east to their deaths.

If you take the RER from Charles de Gaulle airport into central Paris, you will pass through the station at Drancy.

The second photo shows the memorial on the day we visited. The camp was obliterated by the Nazis in 1943 after a prisoner revolt. In the 18 months of its operation as many as 250,000 Jews were gassed and incinerated here. Perhaps, many more than that.

Today, there are practically no physical remains to witness to what happened, save the train tracks and platform, and the 'Tube' / 'Himmelstrasse' - the path along which the shaven, naked, and brutalised people were herded to their deaths.

Today’s Flickr photo with the most hits; a sombre one. 

This is the (extant) latrine block in Birkenau. 

There was no privacy, very little water for washing and little or no opportunity for personal cleanliness in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Prisoners were routinely afflicted with typhus and other diarrhoea-producing illnesses. 

The latrines in this barrack serviced seventeen barracks in B IIa, quarantine; approximately seven thousand prisoners.

Today’s Flickr photo with the most hits: this sombre image from Auschwitz. The electric fence.