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Treblinka to get museum
Etgar Lefkovits
Jerusalem Post
Aug. 19, 2004
The government of Poland is planning
to establish a museum at the Treblinka death camp, a
senior Polish government official said.
The museum, which will be set
up in coordination with Yad Vashem, is slated to open
in about two years, said the chairman of the Polish
Council for the Remembrance of Struggle and Martyrdom,
Andrzej Przewoznik, in an interview with The Jerusalem
Post during a state visit to Israel.
About 870,000 people were murdered
at Treblinka, which was established by the Nazis in
the summer of 1942.
A three-decade-old monument is
the site's only memorial, offering visitors little information
about the atrocities carried out there.
"If you don't know what happened
there before you get there, you wouldn't know from visiting
the site at present," said the chairman of Yad
Vashem's Directorate, Avner Shalev, who hosted Przewoznik
during his first visit to Israel.
In the future, similar museums
will be opened at the now-destroyed Nazi death camps
at Chelmno and Sobibor, Przewoznik added.
Some three million Polish Jews perished in the Holocaust.
At the same time, the final wording
of a memorial plaque in memory of the Jews murdered
by fellow Poles in the northeastern Polish village of
Jedwabne is still the subject of controversy, and the
final text of the memorial plaque may not be ready for
years, Przewoznik said.
A recent book documenting the
killing of thousands of Jews in Jedwabne by their Polish
neighbors - and not, as previously thought by the Nazi
occupiers - caused a major stir in Poland, after decades
in which Poles often portrayed themselves as equal victims
to the Jews during World War II.
The Polish official said the final
text of the plaque - specifying who the murderers were
- will be finalized only after a completion of a listing
of the names of all the people killed in the attack
is ready.
"The important thing here
is not merely the exact number of victims, bu t that
the truth gets out," Shalev said.
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