We arrived in Poland. Using GPS, we drove to Treblinka but it took us only to the town, there were very few signs to the death camp. It was impossible to find it without asking locals, it was located far off the main road, deep in a very forested area, easy to take a wrong turn and get lost completely.

We arrived after following a taxi that we assumed was taking people to the same destination. In my next blog about Treblinka, I will describe our impressions further, but here, I must write about a bizarre phenomenon we experienced at this site, the place where twenty members of our family were murdered probably within thirty minutes of their arrival by train.

The Memorial is essentially 17,000 large stones symbolizing tombstones, all different shapes and sizes, placed on concrete; a large, tower like monument rested heavily on the place where the gas chamber operated and where 800,000 to 900,000 people were gassed; fifty yards away a large, flat rectangular area filled with black basalt surrounded by eighteen miniature black hut-like structures each containing a memorial candle, marked the place where bodies were first thrown into a massive pit and buried but subsequently exhumed and burned to hide the monstrousness of their crimes when they were losing the war.

We arrived, opened the car doors to be greeted by hot, humid air, teeming with hundreds, thousands of flies and mosquitoes flying speedily and haphazardly around us, into our faces, onto our bodies. As we walked toward the memorial site on very large cobblestones that were difficult, even hurtful through our shoes, the flying insects became more profuse and aggressive, following us as we walked along the symbolic train tracks onto the platform where people were dumped out of the trains and instructed to leave all belongings.

The insects did not subside, the closer we got to the memorial stones, the more difficult it became to negotiate our way through the onslaught of insects. It became almost unbearable as we stood close to the large memorial on the site of the gas chamber, and intolerable when we recited the Kadish on the edge of the black rectangle on the site where they were burned. Wasps, bees, flies, mosquitoes, horseflies all buzzed around our faces, our hands, our bodies, angrily, incessantly, mercilessly, forcing us to move, skip, swat, do anything to get away.

I walked to the beginning of the many concrete areas filled with “head stones” and began walking among the stones. I walked alone, immersing my mind in the space we were in.  After a few moments, it dawned on me, the flying insects had disappeared. It was calm; I was left alone to interact with the stones; I walked for about an hour, sometimes stopping to touch a stone, or to place a small stone on one of the many “head stones”, NO FLYING INSECTS. As soon as I stepped off of the concrete and away from the “tomb stones”, I was immediately assaulted by insects again, as angry and as aggressive as before, making it hard to breathe.  As we were walking back to our car, we stopped at the walls that marked the beginning of the memorial to recite the names of our murdered relatives, the insect aggression did not subside, determined to make us endure their unrelenting presence, until we finally got back into our rented car, and closed the doors.

We never encountered the insects anywhere else, not in the neighboring town five minutes from the site, not in the town of Brog just twenty minutes from the site of the death camp, also surrounded by forest, NOWHERE.