Entry 10, 19:13, Bus away from Treblinka

The slip of paper at the back of this journal in the pocket labeled Tekas, was the script I and 3 other people wrote. We preformed this in the middle grounds of Treblinka, no longer a campsite, but now a vast openness of nothing surrounded by trees. There are various sections of memorials, symbols, and rocks with community names on them, they represent the 870, 000 Jews whom were gassed alive and then set on fire to remove the evidence of the bodies. In 1943, the entire camp was burned and destroyed as inmates had escaped and they didn't want anyone to know about the camp if knowledge leaked, so they removed all evidence that it ever existed.
This doesn't mean it wasn't eerie, and that I couldn't imagine what once occurred here, once filled this space. It was just as easy to imagine the piles of dead bodies and the line-ups of people for the gas chamber, the countless lifeless bodies walking without destination, their gaunt eyes like black orbs. Our tour guide told us after the bodies were burned, the mass graves were dug up by the locals in search for treasures that may have been left on the bodies of prisoners. I know now that anti-Semitic, valueless people own the houses I saw on my way to Treblinka. If there is anything more disgusting than digging up the graves of charred bodies in a forest from a Nazi death camp, than it's being able to live with yourself afterwards, and not think that anything is wrong.
Coming back from the camp, I saw a train full of people load off and walk back in the direction opposite the bus, all going home from which job they have from wherever. They all looked normal and happy, as if unaware of their cities past, of the souls that wander only a few KM away.

Treblinka, a death camp.



[Though looking back now, it would make no sense to plague oneself years later with the horrors of WWII, if one lives in a land previously at war, one must understand what the land and its people went th