“Why are you going to Małkinia? It’s a village with nothing.”

His weary tone tugged at me like the hand of a skeptical navigator attempting to rouse sense before the final lurch toward some forsaken shoreline. “Come to Białystok, instead,” he implored.

Beside him sat a young woman in a summery, short-sleeved t-shirt with images of palm trees and an ocean sunset printed above the words, “Newport Beach.” This unexpected reminder of Orange County aboard a Polish National Railway train making an eastward run across Mazovia bore a further inscription, an invocation to “Follow the Sun.”

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Granite-colored clouds blanketed the sky as I traversed Warsaw earlier that morning to the city’s eastern rail station. By foot and by tram, I made my way from a rented room in the Muranów neighborhood to the terminal in the Praga district, across the Vistula River.

The student apartment on Nowolipki Street where I had settled for the weekend lay within the former boundaries of the Warsaw ghetto, a 1.3 square mile section of the city that once held nearly 450,000 people at its peak.[1] The Nazis created ghettos in occupied Eastern Europe at the beginning of World War II to concentrate Jews with the initial intention of eventually expelling them from the Third Reich.[2] The advent of the “Final Solution” in 1941-42, however, resulted in the “liquidation” of the ghettos and the deportation of their inhabitants to death camps and concentration camps. Starvation, disease, forced labor, and executions also took enormous tolls on the ghettos throughout their years of existence. In Warsaw, the Nazis ultimately razed the ghetto in response to a last-stand, armed rebellion by Jewish underground organizations in April-May 1943.

Today, signs of remembrance can be found throughout the former site of the Warsaw ghetto. A monument at the Umschlagplatz (“embarkation point”) on Stawki Street marks the round-up point where Jews faced deportation to the Treblinka death camp, some sixty-five miles to the northeast, under the Nazi aegis of being “resettled in the East.” During the “Great Deportation” from July 22 through September 12, 1942, at least a quarter of a million Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were murdered at Treblinka.[3] The footprint of the ghetto wall is etched into the city landscape and tall metal posts on Chłodna Street denote the pedestrian bridge that once connected two different sections of the ghetto separated by an “Aryan” thoroughfare.

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Another focal point is a park square in Muranów that contains the Polin Museum and several monuments pertaining to the Warsaw ghetto. Opened in 2013, the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews contains a massive, state-of-the-art exhibition about the thousand-year history of Polish Jewry from medieval migrations to the aftermath of World War II. The museum is flanked on its eastern side by a monument to the Warsaw ghetto uprising and by a statue of Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground who secretly visited the Warsaw ghetto and a transit camp near Bełżec in October 1942. After escaping from occupied Europe, Karski shared his eyewitness account with Allied leaders, including Anthony Eden and President Roosevelt. In Lanzmann’s Shoah, Karski’s account of his two clandestine visits to the Warsaw ghetto runs nearly forty minutes and is the longest interview sequence in the film.

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In Warsaw, traces of the past coexist with the city’s ubiquitous apartment blocks that stand like a faceless procession of Iron Curtain vintage. Meanwhile, the city’s old town has been colorfully reconstructed with Disney-esque flair. Both have been built atop a city reduced to rubble in the name of utopia. Both advance new claims about the “end of history” that ironically seem retro today. Perhaps what persists is the utopian impulse to escape history, which paradoxically entrenches us more deeply within it, often with depth-less and devastating consequences.

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Upon arriving at the Eastern Warsaw Terminal, I purchased a ticket for Małkinia and kept an eye on the departure display board while picking up bread and snacks at a supermarket inside the station. Małkinia is sixty miles northeast of Warsaw and the second train stop en route to Białystok, the metropolitan center of northeastern Poland. From Małkinia station, it is five miles to the former site of the Treblinka death camp to which I would either walk or take a taxi.

There are actually two different camps at Treblinka. As the Nazis launched their invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, they established a labor camp near a gravel quarry for 1000 to 1200 Polish and Polish-Jewish prisoners, a site that would eventually become known as Treblinka I.[4] The construction of Treblinka II, a death camp with three gas chambers run on carbon monoxide from a diesel engine, began in the spring of 1942 as part of Operation Reinhard. As a central component of the “Final Solution,” Operation Reinhard aimed at the annihilation of Polish Jews in the General Government through the creation of death camps at Bełżec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. It resulted in the murder of 1.6 to 1.8 million people in 1942-43, over half of which occurred at Treblinka.[5] The Nazis closed, dismantled, and covered over all three camps well before the end of World War II, a process hastened at Treblinka and Sobibor by prisoner rebellions resulting in mass escapes.

As a regional train approached the platform, I glanced at my ticket to figure out which car I had been assigned. Once aboard, my eyes traced the compartment numbers as I ambled down a narrow aisle and my chest tightened when I discovered that my seat lay within a nearly full unit. I silently reproached the ticket agent in Warsaw for the flicker of satisfaction she might have received for filling the compartment even though the train wasn’t particularly crowded. Perhaps our fate lies in the hands of another’s technocratic enjoyment, like blocks in a Tetris game.

Six faces peered as I opened the door and slid inside. Next to the window, a boy of seven or eight leaned on his mother and thumbed through an illustrated children’s book. Across from them, a young, neatly dressed teacher in a tan blazer half-smiled to herself while gazing out at the unfurling landscape. Near the compartment door sprawled three friends who sat up and retracted their feet to allow me to pass. I found my seat beside a man from this group in his twenties with a short, gravelly beard, a scab on his cheekbone, and a purplish black eye, which he periodically concealed behind a pair of dark sunglasses. Opposite him sat a demure woman in her late teens knitting at the locks of her blond hair while beside her the leader of the pack, a young man with a knapsack on his lap, gave me a studied look as I settled in for the journey. A conversation seemed all but inevitable at that point.

“Dzień dobry!” he chirped.

I returned his greeting with the broad, awkward smile of a tongue-tied tourist.

“Ah, English?” he modified expectantly.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Where are you from?”

“California,” I replied, bracing for impact. The mild curiosity evoked by a solo American traveler is often swept into a faraway, starry-eyed, “Really?” upon discovery that the subject hails from the Golden State. I received such a reaction a few days earlier in Warsaw from my host’s sister and my current questioner belonged to the same youthful generation well-versed in the global inflections of California-infused pop culture. An emissary from a lustrous horizon had serendipitously landed before him on this overcast Monday morning.

His eyes widened and introductions followed automatically. Łukasz was returning home to Białystok with his friends Anastazja and Denis, the former wearing the Newport Beach t-shirt and the latter, from neighboring Belarus, sporting the bruised face. An illicit offering of libations ensued as Łukasz surreptitiously produced a bottle of vodka and a liter of Pepsi from his backpack. With each polite decline, my self-appointed host assumed an increasingly offended air so I partially met his hospitality by occasionally sipping from the cup he shared with Denis. Fortunately, the vodka tasted quite watered down. It was only another thirty or forty minutes to Małkinia and I simply needed to make sure that I didn’t miss the stop.

Indeed, the time limit assuaged the mild unease needling me. Łukasz’s solicitous attention verged on excess. A monolingual Spaniard with a liver condition drifted across my mind as a worthy addition to a shrewd traveler’s repertoire of dramatis personae. A concessions vendor wheeled past our compartment and Łukasz bought more Pepsi as well as a carton of orange juice and some pretzels for the young reader, whose mother conjured an appreciative smile in return. He negotiated the subsequent appearance of the ticket inspector with affable banter as the liquor bottle ducked further inside his backpack. Those with cards up their sleeves nurture accomplices, I noted as the train slowed to its first stop in Tłuszcz.

Upon learning that I would be leaving the train in Małkinia, Łukasz furrowed his eyebrows, “But there’s nothing there.”

“Well, I’m not actually going to Małkinia. It’s just on the way to Treblinka.”

For the architects of Operation Reinhard, Treblinka’s simultaneous isolation and proximity to major rail lines made it ideally suited for their plans. At the time, Małkinia served as a railway junction between the main line running northeast from Warsaw to Białystok and another line running east from Małkinia to Siedlce. The village of Treblinka had a station on the Małkinia-Siedlce line and from there the Nazis ordered the construction of a spur leading directly into the death camp.

The link between Małkinia and the Treblinka death camp is established from multiple vantage points in Shoah. Henrik Gawkowski, a local Małkinia resident who worked as a train engineer during the war, famously appears in the film driving a locomotive between Małkinia and Treblinka village along the same route where he once transported countless Jewish victims. Richard Glazar, a Czech Jew and prisoner-worker who sorted victims’ clothing at Treblinka, recalls seeing the station sign at Małkinia as the train ominously pulled off the mainline during his deportation to the camp. Footage of the present-day station is shown at the beginning of Franz Suchomel’s description of camp operations during peak months. Suchomel, a former SS Scharführer [squad leader] at Treblinka had been secretly filmed by Lanzmann with a hidden camera. In a later scene, Raul Hilberg mentions Małkinia while analyzing a fahrplananordnung, a train schedule internal to the Deutsche Reichsbahn [German National Railway], which provides a logistical snapshot of “death traffic” to Treblinka.

A still image from Lanzmann’s interview with Franz Suchomel

By attending to the minor details and everyday routines recounted in eyewitness testimony, the living reality of the past comes more sharply into focus. Forgotten places resurface as vectors of the Holocaust. There is everything in Małkinia.

Denis perked up as Łukasz relayed the quixotic plans of the errant Californian to him in Polish. Sedate until this point, Denis bit into his words and I could only guess at his meaning. His remarks provoked a measured response from the teacher who had been looking intently out the window for most of the journey. Łukasz explained to me that Denis had questioned why I would visit a memorial site for people I never knew while the young teacher defended it as a noble act.

I was beginning to feel like a human Rorschach test. Indeed, I had anticipated being thrust into the spotlight when I first glimpsed the nearly full compartment. To Łukasz and his friends, I embodied a contradiction of terms: Californian visits Treblinka. To the teacher, I signaled a greater good. Both were easier discussions than the history that had actually brought me here. In spite of the close quarters we all managed to dance around it. Rather than delving into an explanation of my work, I preferred to observe their reactions to the inkblot of my intentions. The contours of resistance interest me more than polite nods. There is truth in avoidance.

The train rolled into the next station and I gathered my belongings, anticipating it to be Małkinia even though I couldn’t see any signs on the platform. Łukasz stood up and took hold of my arm, enjoining me one last time to continue with them to Białystok. Yet that route still led to Treblinka as nearly 120,000 Jews from the Białystok district were murdered there, including thousands from the Białystok ghetto.[6]

I pulled myself free with a perfunctory, “I’ve got to go,” and then confirmed with an attendant that we had in fact arrived at Małkinia before I stepped off the train. Next to the deserted platform, weeds spiraled up between the tracks while rusting cargo cars sat listlessly nearby. The parking lot was bereft of taxis. I noticed a small station house where I could arrange for a cab to pick me up but I preferred to decompress after the train ride left me slightly dazed.

I looked to the sky, felt a mist of rain on my face, and began walking.

[1] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3^rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), I: 230.

[2] Yitzhak Arad, The Operation Reinhard Death Camps: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, rev. ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018), 7-15.

[3] Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Vintage, 2007), 308.

[4] Arad, 62.

[5] Arad, 440.

[6] Arad, 172-73.