James Bowen's photos

You learn something new every day!

Prior to its' use as an extermination camp, Treblinka was used as a forced labour camp by the Nazis. Different groups would use different barracks when they weren't working in the gravel pit. This one, as you can see, originally housed Jewish women.

At the end of a 2km track through the Treblinka Concentration Camp, a number of crosses had been erected. I really don't know what they were there for.

Pawiak was a political prison in Warsaw that was used by authoritarian leaders up to 1944, when it was destroyed by the retreating Nazis. 37,000 (of the 100,000 people that the Nazis incarcerated there) died, either there or at concentration camps. There are tablets like this dotted round the outside of the building. I think they comemorate what went on in there. I have no idea what the tablet says, however.

Seeing that the end was nigh for the Nazis, the Polish Home Guard, rose against them with the help of local Warsaw residents. They assumed that the Russians, who were approaching from across the other side of the Vistula (river) would help. They were wrong. After some initial success, the were overwhelmed by the Nazis, who levelled much of the city in the aftermath (only 15% of Warsaw was left standing by the end of the war). Stalin claimed the troups were too exhausted and ill supplied to help. There is some suspicion, however, that Stalin was only too pleased to let the Nazis break the back of the Home Guard, who he regarded as a strong element of the Polish national identity.

This building was given to the people of Poland by Stalin and the Russians. According to the Rough Guide for Poland, it was an attempt to invigorate the Warsaw economy in the 1950s.