“They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, / to do something, to speak on their behalf / or at least not to close the door again. / Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii! / ‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say.”

The first half of the final stanza of Derek Mahon’s epic 1975 poem, A Disused Shed in Co Wexford, attempts to describe the whole of the human condition through the lens of a colony of wild mushrooms, held captive in the eponymous disused shed. Treblinka invokes the man-made disaster and Pompeii, the natural kind. I visited Pompeii some 30 years ago; a single Roman day, 2,000 years ago entombed for posterity in volcanic ash.

Recently I visited Treblinka, 80km north of Warsaw, a site also covered in ash, the human kind.

Treblinka was the third of the so-called “Reinhard camps”, after Belzec and Sobibor. They were named after Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main instigators of the Final Solution. These were camps designed to exterminate human beings as efficiently as possible, using the machinery of industrialised murder. Almost all the victims were European Jews, largely from Poland and the east but deported from across the Continent. Victims arrived by train, packed into cattle wagons and occasionally passenger cars. At Treblinka, there was a sign on the platform with the name of the destination, along with a fictitious timetable to dupe the newly arrived into believing that this was an “ordinary” work camp. Nothing should raise the alarm; that would cause panic and delay the process.

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