Warsaw – Treblinka – Tykocin

Poland has an enormous amount of Jewish heritage sites. Some of those sites are witness to the most horrendous events in history. On this tour we will drive to two such places Treblinka and Tykocin.

There are two camps in Treblinka – Treblinka I, a forced-labor camp and Treblinka II, an extermination camp. More Jews were killed in Treblinka II than in any other concentration camp apart from Aushwitz – around 900,000 in total and about 2000 Romas. By the end of the war the death camp was destroyed in an attempt to hide the evidence of genocide.

Treblinka is also known for the Jewish slave-labor units called Sonderkommandos who were forced to bury victims in mass graves and later in August 1943 revolted, leading to the end of gassing operations in the camp.

The site was declared a national monument of Jewish martyrdom and now has a museum and an impressive memorial built here.

After learning the terrible circumstances of the Operation Reinhard, we will drive to Tykocin, one of the oldest settlements in the region.
Before the war it was home to around 2000 Jews. But when the Nazis came, they assembled all of them at the market square for “relocation”, then marched and trucked them to a nearby forest, where they executed them in waves.

Today Tykocin is a very cozy little town with a lovely market square, a Church and a fair number of old wooden and brick homes.
During our trip we will visit the unique baroque Synagogue which was built in 1642 and survived all wars and destruction and is now a museum. We will see amazing frescoes, arches and a Bima.

Finally, we will visit one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Poland.