Treblinka Extermination Camp, Poland

My Shadow cast across the ground at Treblinka extermination camp, Poland, at the site of the former SS guards' swimming pool. © Erin Faith Allen

To be at this former death camp is to experience a profound sense of being watched while watching.

I arrive after 8pm but it’s still bright with a blue sky. There are no gates, no parking lots, and no gift store.

In total aloneness I wander freely through the various camp locations, the extermination area, the labor camp and barracks, the gravel pit where prisoners worked under conditions that defy the imagination. There are no buildings left. Nothing standing. Only feelings and sensations that move through the space between my thoughts, my breath, and the movement of my feet across the ground.

It is difficult to stay.

To stand before the sparsely placed placards and absorb the magnitude of what happened here presses against something in me that has no name. I want to leave. To walk quickly back to my car and the freeway just down the old bumpy road and let the distance do what distance does. But I stay. Heart in my throat. Every sense open.

What the photograph cannot show is the sprawling flatness behind me, the field that once held the penal labor camp. Pitted earth. Cement foundations marking where barracks stood, holding prisoners who had no way out. Thick forest surrounds every side, a curtain of trees drawing a hard line between the memory of this place and the world that kept moving after it.

I am standing at the edge of deeply hollowed and sloping earth. The placard beside me identifies it as the SS guards' swimming pool.

The sun is beginning to drop behind the trees. Birds are singing. The smell is earthy and rich, the way forests smell near where I grew up in Northern California. The familiarity of it is its own kind of vertigo.

I am so alone here, and so not alone.

I am pulled in and pushed out in the same breath. The ground holds what documents cannot ever fully carry. I stay as long as I can.

Eventually, I leave.