TREBLINKA, Poland -- Every year since World War II heavy rains have uncovered more human bones at the site of the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka in northeast Poland.
Today this site of the Holocaust is a silent, deserted graveyard in a pine and birch forest near a railroad settlement called Malkinia, about 60 miles from the Soviet border.
Its centerpiece is a gray, monolithic granite stone the height of a single-story building marking the site of the gas chambers where nearly 1 million European Jews died.
Behind it is a wide pit about 50 yards long where bodies were cremated on railtrack grids. It is surrounded by 17,000 conical rocks, each about a foot high. One hundred and thirty of them are engraved with the names of places the victims came from.
The two-hour drive to Treblinka from Warsaw through forested, hilly landscape along a narrow winding road is disarmingly beautiful. But the road often crosses the railway leading to Treblinka and some buildings on the way still bear the scars of World War II bullets, shells and bombs.
'In Poland we live every day with the memory of the Holocaust and German brutality. It is all around us,' said Dr. Jacek Wilczur, an historian and chief advisor to the Main Commission for the investigation of Nazi crimes in Poland.
Yet the scale of killing at Treblinka -- one of nine major Nazi concentration and extermination camps in Poland -- is lost even in the evidence at the trial of John Demjanjuk in Israel. Demanjuk is charged with being a guard at the camp who prodded Jews into the gas chambers.
According one of the few official documents available, Treblinka was used only as an extermination camp. Built in mid-1942, it operated until November 1943 alongside a smaller slave labor camp established in 1941 and closed in 1944.
It took 15 minutes to gas 2,000 people at a time in Treblinka.
'Treblinka was run by several dozen Nazi SS troops and over 100 Ukranian facists serving in the German army,' says a leaflet on sale at the site.
Each time a freight train carrying people arrived from the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw or elsewhere, men and women were separated at the camp railroad siding. A handful healthier men and boys were selected as slave laborers mainly to dispose of bodies.
'The average life span of those sent here was two hours,' the leaflet says. 'For those used as slaves, survival was a few hours longer until the arrival of the next transport.'
Camp guards using whips, bayonets and batons herded the women into a building where they were forced to undress and put their jewelry, clothing and valuables into separate containers, later sent by train to Germany. Slaves cut their hair before gassing -- the hair also was sent to Germany.
Men had to undress outside. One Polish document carries photographs of people standing nude in the snow just before gassing. Anyone attempting a dash to the well-guarded barbed wire fence was usually shot or caught and beaten sensenless. Women were raped. Pregnant women were frequently disemboweled alive.
Undressed, men and women were were pushed into two buildings, one with 10 gas chambers, each about 20 by 20 feet, the other with three, about 15 by 15 feet. Children were thrown on top of the adults, and a diesel engine pumped fumes in.
'Sometimes people were forced to physical exercises so that the lungs and heart worked more quickly and the gas would work more effectively,' another document said. In 10 to 15 minutes the screams died, and there was silence.
Wilcuzur said an estimated 950,000 Jews were murdered within Treblinka's one square mile. Other documents cite a figure of over 800,000.
'It is impossible to find out the exact figure,' Wilczur said. 'Every year we still find more bones at Treblinka. The trees and the grass you see there today are growing on human remains.
'Unlike some other camps, people deported here stood no chance. No one remained alive for very long,' said Wilczur who went to Israel with documentation for the Demjanjuk trial.
'Every year since the war more human bones are exposed after every heavy rainfall,' said Tadeusz Kiryluk, a local resident appointed official guide at Treblinka in 1964, in confirmation.
Walking the 100 yards along Himmel Strasse ('The Road to Heaven,' as the Germans named it) from the camp railhead to the granite monument, pieces of bone can still be seen.
'It is unreal to think those are the bones of our grandparents,' said Anthony Moss, 19, of London, during a visit to Treblinka with a Jewish youth group.
'The unthinkable happened here,' said Aharon Kaplan, 40, a Polish Jew living in Israel. 'I brought these kids from England, Israel and Belgium to see this sadness so that they will never forget. Israel is the only place for us.'
The monument at Treblinka was built between 1959 and 1963. Earlier this year, Mariola Szymanczyk, 23, was appointed to help Kiryluk set up a museum and film projection hall.
'A few months after an uprising in the camp (Aug. 2, 1943) in which only a handful managed to escape, the Germans destroyed the buildings and tried to hideall evidence of what took place here. But they were unable to,' said Kiryluk.
Himmel Strasse and other areas were paved with burned human remains.
