|
Former Nazi Camps
In Poland, there are many former sites
where Nazi Germans killed civilians. Of these, the former sites of
concentration and death camps are in a category of their own.
Within the territory of postwar Poland, the largest German camps
were Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Gross-Rosen, Stuthoff, Sobibor and
Chelmno. Each of them also had a number of sub-camps and satellite
camps. Jews, Poles, Russians, as well as members of several other
nationalities all perished there. Each of the main groups had its own
particular characteristics, its own tragic history, heroic days and
shameful history. In each of them, hundreds of thousands of
people-children, women, old people, rabbis, priests, students, pupils
and the disabled-all met their deaths.
|
Death, planned as the aim of the Jewish and
Roma transports, was also the fate of hundreds of thousands of
concentration camp prisoners, the intelligentsia, members of the
resistance, those who hid Jews or people who were arrested in random
street roundups.
After the war, these sites were protected by law. The most important
of these are remembered and visited each year by hundreds of thousands
of people from all over the world. In some, museums have been opened,
but unlike other Holocaust museums, these places are above all enormous
cemeteries-witness to the fate that people inflicted on other people.
(pc/cm)
Treblinka:
|
|
MAIN PAGE