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THE TERRAIN to the east of Warsaw along the Western Bug is an expanse of alternating sands and swamps interspersed with evergreen and deciduous forests. The landscape is drear and villages are rare. The narrow, sandy roads where wheels sink up to the axle and walking is difficult, are something for the traveller to avoid.
In the midst of this desolate country stands the small out-of-the-way station of Treblinka on the Siedlce railway branch line. It is some sixty kilometres from Warsaw and not far from Małkinia station where lines from Warsaw, Białystok, Siedlce and Łomża meet.
Many of those who were brought to Treblinka in 1942 may have had occasion to travel this way before the war. Staring out over the desolate landscape of pines, sand, more sand and again pines, scrubland, heather, unattractive station buildings and railway crossings, the pre-war passenger might have allowed his bored gaze to pause for a moment on a single-track spur running from the station into the forest to disappear amid the dense pines. This spur led to a pit where white sand was extracted for industrial purposes.
The sand pit is situated about four kilometres from the station in an open stretch of country surrounded on all sides by pine woods. The soil here is poor and barren, and the peasants do not cultivate it. And so the land is bare but for a few patches of moss and an occasional sickly pine. Now and then a jackdaw or a bright-combed hoopoe wings past, but no bird stops to build its nest here.
This desolate wasteland is the spot Heinrich Himmler, the SS Reichsführer, selected and approved for the site of a slaughterhouse the like of which the human race has not known from the age of primitive barbarism to these cruel days of ours. The main SS slaughterhouse, surpassing those at Sobibór, Majdanek, Bełżec and Oświęcim, was located here.
There were two camps in Treblinka: labour camp No. 1, where prisoners of various nationalities, chiefly Poles, worked, and camp No. 2 for Jews.
Camp No. 1, of the labour or punitive type, was located in the immediate vicinity of the sand pit, not far from the woods. It was one of the hundreds and thousands of similar camps the Hitlerites set up in the occupied countries of Eastern Europe. It came into being in 1941. In it the various traits of the German character, distorted in the hideous mirror of the Hitler regime, co-existed in a sort of frightful unity. Thus do the delirious ravings of a fevered mind give an ugly, distorted reflection of the thoughts and emotions experienced by the patient before his illness. Thus does a madman distort the logical behaviour and thoughts of the normal person. Thus does the criminal commit his crime, combining in that hammer blow aimed at the bridge of the victim’s nose the keen eye and the firm grip of the foundry worker with a cold-bloodedness that is sub-human.