Being dropped back at the deserted station and realising there isn’t a train till the evening.  The need to walk, to find a place that feels like shelter.   
 
Smells of diesel and sileage on the road leading away from the station.  Empty wheat fields broken by a yard of corrugated business units – paint cans stacked inside an open doorway; a shuttered hair salon that could have just finished for the day or been closed for years.   
 
A disused shed half covered in brambles.   
 
After a day of rain, being blinded by the sun.  Hunger pangs.  Remembering the morning taste of chałka and jam in the café at Warsaw Centrum – bentwood chairs, bistro tables.   
 
Walking further, vision returning. Noticing the burning light comes not from the sun but its glare against a dormer window floating above the fields beyond the tracks.   
 
Catching sight of the neon filling station & shop.  Inside, the eyes of the teenager behind the counter brightening at his chance to practise English.  The glow of heat lamps behind deli glass.  Smoked sausage being slipped into a tubular, hollowed-out roll.  Watching in silence as it toasts on the grill. 
 
Is Małkinia far? 
This is  Małkinia, you’re in the centre!  No hint of guile in his laugh. 
I’m trying to pass the time before the train. 
You can wait here if you want. 

*
 
[Three-and-a-half hours earlier] 
 
Seen through the drizzle, the solitary hackney car waiting outside the station.  The heavy-set driver relieved to have a fare.  Who keeps talking through the ten-minute journey, not minding that I don’t understand.  The off-peak motorway with the forest on one side and brown stubble fields on the other.  The loud ticking of the indicator as we wait to turn into the pines.  Him saying the word parasol and me holding onto it, the only word I recognise. 
 
Coming to a stop in a cobble-stoned car park with a visitors kiosk. The driver getting out and going around to the boot. The sly triumph in his smile as he presents me with an umbrella.  The pantomime of wrist pointing and holding up fingers: he would come to collect me in three hours. 
 
The group of uniformed boys rushing from the toilets and vanishing towards the forest.  Their zest, the skullcaps they wore.  The woman in the kiosk explaining that visitors were required to visit the museum before exploring the site.  Quiet-spoken, unhurried – this work, she seems to say, is my sacred duty.  After speaking, returning to her handwritten ledger. 
 
The empty museum that feels like a school hall with an exhibition.  White breeze block walls with clerestory light.  Sepia display-boards laying bare how hell was disguised as a cleansing stop-over: killing sites tricked out as ritual bathhouses, tiles embossed with the Star of David.  

The farewell note retrieved from the cuff of a turned-up sleeve.  A broken toothcomb. 

The centrepiece: a papier mache model of the original camp.  Train cars waiting outside the toytown station.  Hanging baskets on the platform, an ornate clock. The obsession with deception. Hearing in my mind snatches of the light music that was piped over the PA.   
 
Zoning out in front of a blank black screen.  The attendant asking from behind his counter if I’d like him to play the video.  The echo of his voice in the empty hall. 
 
                                                                        * 
 
Not noticing the sun has come out till I’m past the visitors kiosk and about to enter the forest path. Being overtaken by a pair of mountain bikers in matching lycra.  Them stopping to peruse the information board with the colour-coded trails.   
 
Only realising later that the parallel slabs of granite at the end of the path stand for the railway tracks.  Gripping my folded umbrella.  Saying a prayer.  Turning it into a mantra.  The sensation seeker’s not wanting to believe what the video said about none of the original structures remaining; that all there’s to see is a minimalist memorial of traces.  
 
Emerging from the forest into a vast clearing.  The stillness of the air, it’s after-rain brightness.  Acres of jagged rocks jutting from the earth in ordered formations.  Harvested fields stretching for miles in the background.   
 
Being afraid to draw near to the towering centrepiece – the obelisk that marks the spot.  
The pit in its shadow covered in black basalt shards, about the size of a swimming pool. 
 
Forgetting the mantra and starting again.  The temporary relief of sky. 
 
Deciphering place names inscribed on the rocks – Minsk, Masovie, Bialystok, Sobolew, Falenica, Siennica…; the small stones and soft-toys left sitting on their ledges as gestures.   
 
Retreating to the shelter of the pines.    
 
                                                                     * 
 
The garage forecourt darkening beyond my window seat.  Streaked with reflections of the coffee-corner countertop, paper plate, plastic knife.  The palpable taste of the sausage, the mustard, the butter, the bread.  Snapping out of it and noticing that the shop is no longer empty.  Commuters paying for diesel, cigarettes – requesting the key to the toilet.  The practised ease of the boy as he deals with each customer, the rhythms of his giving and taking lightened by who-knows-what prospects – a move to the city, someone to love? 
 
The man in overalls paying for a plastic container of diesel; his work-tired plod from till to door.  Outside the doorway him stalling by a pail of hydrangeas to stare at something – an older man bent over the nozzle at the farthest pump. The hesitancy of the younger man as he makes his approach, the older man’s lack of surprise.  Being unable to look away from this silent film unspooling through my own reflection: the delicacy in the air, the thin layer of calm.  Holding my breath as the younger one, who is not young, lays down his container, lights a cigarette, then offers the pack to the other. 
 
Not needing to understand what’s happening between them. 
 
 
                                                                  * 
 
[Earlier, in the cobblestoned car park] 
 
Finished early, waiting in the drizzle that has started again.  Fingering the acorn in my pocket – that I have stolen from the pine needle floor.  After everything, still craving sensation.  Wishing I had asked the taxi driver to come earlier.  How could August be so chilly?   
 
A distant figure coming closer, hunched against the rain: the museum attendant stepping out behind the kiosk for a smoke.  Him chatting through the open back door to the woman inside.  The green filter on his rollie.  The ground behind the kiosk littered with green filters. The sotto voce of their conversation.  Her way of listening without giving any indication of listening – getting on with her ledger. 
 
Me watching them.  Feeling the cold all around.  Forgetting it is them and me, thinking only of us – the three of us – still holding all that warmth inside our bodies. 
 
The hackney man arriving on the dot.  More subdued than before, anxious.  Whose silence I take as permission to scan the speeding forest for glimpses of watchtowers, vestiges, ghosts still running for their lives towards the perimeter fence.   
 
Nothing to see but unmoving pines – until the moment I’ve given up and we near the blank reverse side of a solitary road sign whose stark rectangle I recognise from the journey out.  Knowing then that more than the burial pits, the monuments, the model station, it will be the jolt of this motorway signpost that won’t be forgotten – plain white letters on soft-hued green, the word hurtling into focus through the windscreen:  
 
Treblinka.   
 
The place existed.  
 
                                                                 * 
 
Cursing myself for not carrying more cash. The taxi man’s crestfallen face as he counts the fare.  No words, just a shrug at the stinginess of my tip.  Left standing at the kerb, I’ve destroyed everything. 
 
                                                                * 
 
“Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!/’Save us, save us,’ they seem to say…” (Derek Mahon, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford). 
 
Why not Auschwitz? I asked him.  Why Treblinka? 
Oh, the poet said dismissively but with no hint of unkindness, Scansion probably. 
 
                                                                * 
The older man accepting the cigarette without a pause.  Frail inside a loose suit – neat, almost swanky. The two men leaning against the back of the car as they smoke, facing the same direction.  The silence they keep, that looks neither comfortable nor uneasy – like the silence of a snowdrift blanketing a blighted field. The younger man eventually picking up his container, which seems lighter than before, and sauntering into the pitch-black road.  The older man getting into his car, his fatigue.  The absence of expression in his face as he drives away. 
 
Driving to where?   
 
A nearby village? The house with the dazzling window on the other side of the tracks?   
 
That’s stood long enough to have been seen through the slats of a cattle car. 
 
For a boy in the yard to have innocently waved as it passed. 
 
Old Polish farmhouses.  Steep gabled roofs with dormer windows.  Dark wood interiors smelling of beeswax and chrysanthemums, church smells.  On a landing upstairs, the immovable ancestral chest.  Downstairs, discreet between porch and kitchen, the door to the cellar.  Smooth stone steps to a rough stone floor.  Crouching when you’re down there.   Trying not to bang your head on the beam above the passage that runs between the pantry and the ramshackle laundry.  The freezing dark, the moment when there’s no-one to save you.  Fingertipping the walls for the switch.   
 
 
 
Notes :

Over eighteen months from 1943, an estimated 850,000 Jews were exterminated at Treblinka.  It has been described as the single most efficient death camp of the Holocaust. 
  
Małkinia is a railway junction four miles from Treblinka and 60 miles outside of Warsaw. 
 
The quote from an encounter with Derek Mahon is from ‘Meeting the Poet’ by Oliver Sears (RTE Radio 1, Sunday Miscellany, 30 November 2025) 
 
'The place existed' is a quote from Claude Lanzmann in his epic documentary on the Holocaust, 'Shoah'.