Holocaust Memorial. Treblinka was a Nazi death camp during World War II. After Auschwitz-Birkenau, it was the bloodiest site of the Holocaust. Located near the Polish village of Treblinka, 70 miles northeast of Warsaw, it was one of three killing centers (the others were Belzec and Sobibor) built in 1942 to realize Hitler's savage dream of destroying the Jews of Europe. The camp was divided into two sections. Treblinka I was designed to resemble a transit camp, with posted railway schedules and a fake clock tower (the hands on the clock were painted on). There was a beer garden and a zoo (for the S.S. only), and barracks for 150 guards and 700 prisoners. Victims arriving by train were told that their stay at Treblinka would be temporary, but they had to shower and be deloused in order to prevent disease. Then the selection process began. The extermination facilities of Treblinka II sat on a small hill and were camoflaged from the rest of the complex. A fenced-in, upward path, cynically named "The Road to Heaven" by the S.S., led directly to the 10 gas chambers, which could kill up to 15,000 people a day. The elderly or infirm were taken to another area disguised as a Red Cross station, and shot. Bodies were cremated in huge pits that were kept burning without pause. Camp II also housed the 300 members of the mainly Jewish Sonderkommando, who were forced to aid the killing and dispose of the remains. Treblinka was perhaps the most ferocious of the Nazi death camps. Auschwitz was many times larger, but it was also a vast industrial and transport center that depended on forced labor to function. An Auschwitz prisoner who was young and strong, or had what the Nazis considered an "essential skill", could at least entertain some small hope of survival. At Treblinka there was no hope at all. It contributed nothing to the German war effort; its sole purpose was murder on a factory scale. Nearly all who were sent there went from the boxcars to the gas chambers to the cremation pits within two hours. For the few chosen to live it was only a slight reprieve: the average life expectancy among the inmate population was five days. Random shootings and abuse were part of the daily routine, and many prisoners cracked under the strain and hanged themselves at night from their bunks. It was not until the spring of 1943, when operations at Treblinka began to wind down, that there were enough long-term survivors to organize a resistance movement. On August 2, the Jews staged an uprising. Using a copied key from the armory, they seized small weapons, killed dozens of guards and set several buildings on fire. Some 200 prisoners managed to escape; about 50 were still alive at the time of the Allied liberation. The revolt marked the end of Treblinka as a killing center. Mass executions ceased there on August 22 and remaining inmates were shipped to Auschwitz and Sobibor. The camp was completely demolished and declared closed on November 17, 1943. During its 13 months of active operation, approximately 900,000 people, most of them Jews, were murdered at Treblinka. The actual death toll may be as high as 1.4 million. Only 100 of its prisoners lived to see the end of the war. Today a symbolic cemetery called the "Valley of Stones" covers the former Camp II grounds. Each of its 17,000 stones bears the name of a city, town, or village from where victims were sent to their deaths at Treblinka. On the site of the gas chambers stands a stark stone monument, with a fissure down its center to represent the unfathomable evil that took place there.