If the children of Nazis can honour my family in Treblinka, we can all find a path forward

“They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, / to do something, to speak on their behalf / or at least not to close the door again. / Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii! / ‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say.”

The first half of the final stanza of Derek Mahon’s epic 1975 poem, A Disused Shed in Co Wexford, attempts to describe the whole of the human condition through the lens of a colony of wild mushrooms, held captive in the eponymous disused shed. Treblinka invokes the man-made disaster and Pompeii, the natural kind. I visited Pompeii some 30 years ago; a single Roman day, 2,000 years ago entombed for posterity in volcanic ash.

Recently I visited Treblinka, 80km north of Warsaw, a site also covered in ash, the human kind.

Treblinka was the third of the so-called “Reinhard camps”, after Belzec and Sobibor. They were named after Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main instigators of the Final Solution. These were camps designed to exterminate human beings as efficiently as possible, using the machinery of industrialised murder. Almost all the victims were European Jews, largely from Poland and the east but deported from across the Continent. Victims arrived by train, packed into cattle wagons and occasionally passenger cars. At Treblinka, there was a sign on the platform with the name of the destination, along with a fictitious timetable to dupe the newly arrived into believing that this was an “ordinary” work camp. Nothing should raise the alarm; that would cause panic and delay the process.

Women, children and men were quickly separated into two barracks where they were stripped of their possessions, sheared of their hair – to be herded naked up a path, cynically named Himmelsstrasse (Heaven St). Awaiting them were gas chambers that would fill with carbon monoxide from repurposed Russian tank engines. German and Trawniki (Ukrainian) guards exacted unnatural cruelty on their victims. The weak and infirm, and anyone trying to resist, were immediately taken to another building disguised as a hospital and shot into a deep pit. Other large pits were dug to burn the bodies.

Seldom acknowledged are the mass rapes of Jewish women. For the perpetrators, these women were already dead; the last residue of dignity would be stolen from them minutes before choking to death by gas, depravity enabled by total impunity. The silence over the rape of Jewish women chimes with recent times.

Treblinka ran between July 23rd, 1942, and October 19th, 1943. There were very few survivors; a rebellion by those forced to work in the camp led to 200 escaping, half of whom survived. The Nazis bulldozed the camp, constructed a farmhouse and planted crops in the fields to disguise their crimes. As many as 925,000 Jews were murdered here. They included my mother Monika’s aunt, Sonia Rozenfeld, and some 100 members of my father’s family. I’m still researching their fate, as the erasure of Jewish memory was as important to the Nazis as the extinction of Jewish life. Records are often not easily found.

I was accompanied by members of PAKH, a Cologne-based dialogue group comprising the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and Nazis. Treblinka was the culmination of a trip that took us to Warsaw and Lodz, where we visited former sites of resistance and memorial sites, days that gave us time to talk, both casually and in formal dialogue sessions. These were conversations between descendants of some of the worst Nazi criminals and their victims.

At Treblinka, in a sea of thousands of stones erected as a monument, names are carved into the taller ones from all 220 towns from which Jews were deported. I found my paternal’s grandfather’s town, Pultusk, north of Warsaw, and by sheer coincidence, Siemiatycze, the town where one of my co-travellers’ families originated, stood barely three metres away, facing each other. I had brought five small stones from my garden in Dublin with me to place on the memorial stone, as is Jewish practice. My friend Alexandra Senfft stood by my side. She had made two films with Tomi Reichental, the Holocaust survivor and campaigner, who died last May. He had contacted her 12 years ago. Senfft’s maternal grandfather, Hanns Ludin, Hitler’s so-called envoy to Slovakia, had signed the deportation orders to Belsen for Reichental and his family.

The first stone I laid was for Tomi Reichental, who is being memorialised at the Mansion House today, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-sponsored pogrom which took place on November 9th and 10th, 1938, and fired the starting pistol for the Holocaust.

I had shown no interest in having any engagement with the heirs of the Nazis until I met Senfft, when she came to participate with Reichental and me in Dublin in 2022 for another event at Dublin Castle to commemorate Kristallnacht, hosted by Holocaust Awareness Ireland. How this sensitive, kind man, who had experienced the extremity of injustice as a nine-year-old, opened his heart to Senfft was profoundly affecting. And how Senfft responded with love and humility changed my understanding of how I must navigate my own Holocaust legacy. If a Belsen survivor could talk to Senfft, so could I. Together, we spoke about this experience as the rest of the group stood in a horseshoe around us.

I laid stones for my great aunt, Sonia, my father, Ronald’s family from Pultusk, my late mother and for all the victims of this wretched corner of history. My friend, a former rabbi, laid a stone for his family before reciting Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead that mentions only life. I learnt about the power of the group, how the children of those who had dishonoured our families in the most grievous way possible could begin the process of restoration and repair by honouring our families in our presence, in this heart of darkness. The evil plan, turned on its head and vanquished.

And here in Treblinka, where the beauty of a rich forest hides the ugliest truth, I felt at once protective of my friends and grateful for their support. Returning to Mahon’s poem, for the “lost souls”, we did “do something” and speak on their behalf, although we could not save them. On my journey back to Warsaw, heartened by the endless possibility of dialogue, the dread I feared walking atop blood and bones evaporated. If the children of Nazis can honour my family in Treblinka, then antagonists everywhere can and must find a path towards mutual respect.