News & Reviews

Tomasz Cebulski - Polin Travel Speech

Good afternoon,

My name is Tomasz Cebulski. I am a guide and a Holocaust researcher. Thanks to the generosity and invitation of the Newcastel City Council I came today from Cracow in Poland to have this chance and honor to say a few words about the work of my friend Paul Brown.
I will try to be brief as this is the evening of images and pictures more then the spoken word.

The images you can see are the results of Paul Brown’s work in eastern Poland last year. After a successful visit to photograph Auschwitz-Birkenau, he undertook an even harder challenge. Challenge of documenting and bringing to you the images from places like Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibór, Majdanek, Zblitowska Gora and others... Nowadays for majority of people those names of villages communicate nothing and this was the reason why Paul went there. The striking thing is that they communicate nothing because the German-Nazi murderers designed those massive extermination camps to be like this. They did their best so that we would not remember.

In late 1941 the Nazi Germany decided what is the next step in their anti-Jewish policy. This was also a time when they came across the technology of mass killing in gas chambers. Technology developed due to experiments with euthanasia using carbon monoxide, experiments with gas vans in Chelmno where the exhaust fumes were directed into the back of a truck filed with people, finally experiments with cyclone B in Auschwitz. Everything to make the crime more efficient and massive but also to make the perpetrators more anonymous and less mentally burdened. The purpose was to make the crime sanitized from emotions and a factory a like process. With the massiveness of the crime there came a need to keep the major killing sites well hidden from the sight of the world’s opinion and need for perfect logistics. Auschwitz-Birkenau was changed to be a destination for international transports of Jews using its concentration camp history as a cover up for the new mass extermination function. Poland in 1939 was inhabited by 3,3 millions of Jews which made it the largest Jewish community in the world of that time. In order not to block the technical capacity of gas chambers of Birkenau with Polish Jews, the German Nazis took a decision to open 4 major, extermination camps in Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor.

They were to be built in scarcely populated territories, well hidden in the forests far from Western Europe, built to operate temporarily just to kill as many Jews as possible from particular well planned territory and designed to be taken apart completely after the task is accomplished.


Chelmno - 18 months of operation 150.000 people killed.
Belzec – 12 months of operation 500.000 people killed.
Sobibor – 19 months of operation 200.000 people killed
Treblinka - 12 months of operation 800.000 people killed.

The striking thing is that when you visit those places today there is not much to be seen from those camps existence. The German crime was not only about killing those people it was also about eradicating the memory about their existence and a way in which they were killed. The crime was to be perfect and the cover up took a tremendous effort. There were literally few pictures taken during those camps operation and this is making the work of Paul Brown so special today. It is thanks to his sensitivity and engagement of the Newcastel City Council that those images from the past are brought to light again. The things that are the most important on those pictures are those that we can’t see at the first glance. It is important to give those images a second layer which is filled with people, corpses, screams, suffocating smoke and all those things referred often by survivors as indescribable. Small pieces of land not bigger than a football field were changed into ultimate accumulation of evil bringing death of 800.000 people in case of Treblinka. Evil which was developed in human brains and potentially is still there. The work of Paul Brown is important as it brings those places in front of our eyes again. They are finally brought to attention here few thousand miles away from Treblinka which was not possible in 1942. We owe this attention to the victims who were completely abandoned when the crime was committed. We owe them memory, reflection but also action. Action which would give their suffering and martyrdom a deeper sense. Action showing that their sacrifice was not in vain. Action which we owe nowadays to suffering population of Darfur, Rwanda, Iraq, Bosna and many other places which are the Treblinkas of our time. Treblinkas which are not operating in the shadow of a deep forest but killing right on our eyes.

So today Paul and his work are sending us all a very strong massage to learn from the past in order to teach and act for the better future. Thank you Paul.