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2 August 1943
TREBLINKA REVOLT
ROLL OF REMEMBRANCE
Long live the brave insurgents of Treblinka !
80 years ago
2 August 1943
Treblinka revolt
The Treblinka camp began operations on July 23, 1942 (interestingly, on the day of the Jewish holiday of Tisha b'Av). A transport of Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto arrived that day. The first camp commandant was Irmfried Eberl, who had already become "famous" for his brutality in Operation T4, or the killing of wounded Soviet prisoners of war. He held the post for only a month, as according to extermination camp inspector Christian Wirth, he "did not perform his duties properly." In August, he was replaced by Franz Stangl, also the executor of Operation T4. The new administrator built a wooden dummy station so that future victims would not guess what awaited them and new gas chambers that could hold up to 3,000 people, and streamlined the entire organization of the camp so that the extermination process could proceed smoothly.
The prisoners were encouraged to resist by scraps of information about the defeat of the fascists at Stalingrad and the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. It was rightly sensed that the executioners would want to cover up their crimes by murdering all prisoners and blowing up the camp infrastructure. In order to prevent this, an Organizing Committee was formed in late February and early March. It was formed by Julian Chorążycki (a medical doctor from Warsaw, captain in the pre-war Polish Army), Ze'ew Kurland (kapo), Želomir "Želo" Bloch (a Czechoslovakian army officer), Israel Sudowicz (an agronomist from Warsaw), and Władysław Salzberg (a furrier from Kielce, manager of a tailor's shop). After some time they were also joined by Adolf Friedman from Lodz (kapo in the sorting commando, probably a former soldier in the Foreign Legion).
The conspirators planned to get weapons from the guards by bribing them with valuables left over from gassed Jews. Unfortunately, the Nazis discovered the money intended for this purpose with Chorążycki, who in mid-April committed suicide because of this. The group also lost "Želo" Bloch and Adolf Friedman, as they were transferred to work in another part of the camp.
One day in April, the lock on the door to the weapons magazine, which was located in the German crew's quarters, broke down. Eugeniusz Turowski, a Jewish locksmith, took this opportunity to secretly make a key. Other prisoners also began to join the group, so that by July it numbered about 60 conspirators.
The revolt was planned for August 2, 1943. The insurgents had prepared knives, axes and gasoline canisters. Fortunately for the conspirators, the guard force was reduced by four SS men and sixteen trawniki mens, among them Deputy Commandant SS-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, who left the camp to take a dip in the Bug River. In addition, Stangel was visited by a familiar officer with whom he got drunk. At 2 pm, the prisoners began to remove weapons from the warehouse. Dozens of grenades were brought out of the warehouse, as well as several pistols and rifles with a small amount of ammunition. Under the guise of routine decontamination, they doused the walls of the wooden barracks and workshops with gasoline, and Rudek Lubrenicki, under whose care the camp's car park was located, damaged the engine of an armored car parked in the garage.
