Historical Assessment of the Memorial Stones Bearing the Names of Jedwabne and Radziłów at the Treblinka Memorial Site
The Methodological Framework
This document addresses a single question: should the stones bearing the names of Jedwabne and Radziłów be removed from the Treblinka Memorial Site? The answer is unequivocal: they should not. This conclusion does not rest on denying the historical record. Most of the Jews of these two communities were not murdered at Treblinka. They were murdered in the summer of 1941, in acts of local violence in which Poles participated, under German occupation and within the broader campaign of persecution that unfolded in northeastern Poland after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. This fact must stand at the center of any future explanation of the two stones. It must not be obscured, softened, or evaded.
The controversy appears, at first glance, narrowly defined: two stones, two names, one question. In fact it concerns the nature of the Treblinka Memorial Site, the status of a monumental work more than six decades old, the relationship between historical research and collective memory, and the limits of the authority of present-day institutions to reshape a historic landscape of remembrance. Framing it as a simple test of factual accuracy narrows the issue in advance and assumes the desired conclusion.
The demand for removal rests on unstated assumption: that every stone at the memorial constitutes an explicit statement that the community named on it was murdered at Treblinka. That assumption is historically flawed and fails to account for accurate historical memory. The community stones are not a list of transports or a statistical key to the place of murder. They form a symbolic work of commemoration, intended to give presence to a Jewish world that was erased, to stand in place of gravestones never erected, and to restore to the Polish landscape the names of communities with virtually no one left to commemorate their memory. Three dimensions must be kept distinct.
The first is the event: what happened in Jedwabne and Radziłów in 1941, who the perpetrators were, who survived, and who was transferred elsewhere. The second is commemoration: when the stones were installed, who requested them, and how they were understood at the time. A memorial site is itself a product of later history and must be studied like any other historical evidence. It is created after the event, by people who did not experience it in the same way, within a particular cultural and political framework. Its historical facts and its commemorative history are not identical, and neither cancels the other. The third is intervention: what an action taken at the site today means. Even where an element rests on incomplete knowledge, there is a difference between adding an explanation and erasing an element, between correcting a factual statement and removing a multivalent symbol, and between a reversible change and an irreversible physical act. These dimensions do not compete. A responsible assessment must hold all three together, and each must be answered with its own tools.
A memorial stone must not be defended by denying history, nor may its removal be presented as the automatic application of historical truth. A memorial site is not a textbook that can be reprinted while the previous edition is discarded. The purpose here is not to immunize monuments against change. It is to insist that an irreversible intervention at a memorial site carries an especially heavy burden of proof. It must be shown not only that the existing arrangement is inadequate, but that no more accurate and less damaging way of correcting it exists. That burden has not been met by those seeking to remove the memorials for the communities of Jedwabne and Radziłów.
Treblinka as a Landscape of Absence and a Symbolic Cemetery
Treblinka differs from sites where barracks, fences, or killing installations survived. The Germans dismantled the camp and attempted to erase every material trace of the crime. The designers, Adam Haupt, Franciszek Duszeńko, and Franciszek Strynkiewicz, therefore had to commemorate not only the murder but the erasure of its traces. The monument is not a reconstruction. The stone track is not a preserved railroad, and the field of stones is not a cemetery in the conventional sense. These are artistic devices that create presence in a place defined by absence. The site is an integrated spatial work whose meaning is produced through the visitor’s movement: entering along the approach route, advancing toward the central monument, encountering the field of stones and the multiplicity of names. The visitor enters a space that gives ceremonial form to destruction. Treblinka is a gravestone for victims who received none, and a cemetery for communities left with no graves for their dead, and no survivors to carry on their legacy.
This is precisely what Pierre Nora called a lieu de mémoire. A site of memory that arises when the living environment of memory has been ruptured and no community remains to transmit its past. The stones fulfill this function in its clearest form. Each stands in place of a community that can no longer bear its own memory, a community that lost its synagogues, cemeteries, institutions, and families. A stone at Treblinka is therefore not merely a geographical label; it is a material substitute for an entire social world.
James E. Young demonstrated that monuments do not reflect the past as transparent mirrors. They express their own time and the way a society sought to read history. Treblinka must therefore not be judged solely by whether a stone matches what a scholarly book would state today. It must also be asked what the stone testifies about the history of memory and about the effort of survivors of Polish Jewry to restore to the landscape the names of the places from which they were uprooted. This does not weaken accuracy; it defines it more rigorously. Accuracy at a memorial site means presenting both the event and the manner in which it was commemorated. It means showing present knowledge alongside earlier layers of knowledge, and the social and symbolic paths that led to this form of commemoration.
Jewish Involvement and the Creation of the Community Stones
The documentation shows that the idea of the community stones was never a closed principle. A 1960 plan considered engraving the names of prominent individuals murdered at Treblinka. In 1961, at the initiative of the Jewish Historical Institute, this was replaced with the names of places from which murdered Jews had been deported, and the planned number grew to roughly 130. One document mentions large groups, but no formulation established a majority test, a numerical threshold, or a principle of destruction at the site. Nothing in the documents required proof that an entire community had been brought to the camp. The criterion now presented as self-evident was never written anywhere.
The shift from individuals to communities was a decision of profound Jewish significance. It rejected a pantheon of famous figures, avoided a hierarchy between the famous victim and the anonymous one, and placed communal existence at the center. It also proves that a central Jewish institution was a partner in shaping the commemorative principle itself.
In the 1990s the meaning of the stones was explicitly broadened. Representatives of Polish Jewish émigrés in Israel requested the completion of the list and stressed that in many cases a stone would be the only evidence that a Jewish community had ever existed. An appeal of 1996 described the engraved names as symbolic testimony to communities from which, at times, not a single survivor remained. The list was checked against historical scholarship, reviewed by the Jewish Historical Institute, and accepted by the site administration and by the creators of the monument themselves. The stones added then are therefore not an error that intruded upon the original work, but a recognized historical layer in its development. They also bear witness to a distinct phase in the history of Holocaust memory: the period in which survivors began to restore the names of Jewish localities to the map of Poland and to ensure that those names would not disappear with the death of the last survivors. Active memorial sites are never permanently frozen at the moment of their dedication. New ceremonies, interpretive panels, research, and changes in public consciousness find their way into the memorial landscape.
Hence removal is not symmetrical to addition. The additions of the 1990s left the earlier arrangement intact; removal today would efface both the community’s name and the traces of those who fought to commemorate it. Erasure is a stronger act than interpretation. It does not argue with the past; it denies the visitor the possibility of seeing that the argument ever took place.
What Do the Stones Represent?
A stone bearing a place-name can commemorate at least five things: a departure point of a transport to the camp; the home locality of individuals who reached the camp; a Jewish community destroyed in the Holocaust; an element in a landscape of memory; or a name included through the later history of commemoration. The field of stones has always contained different and intersecting forms of connection. The stones bearing the names of countries, and the stone for Janusz Korczak and the children, prove that the monument was never reducible to sterile geographical classification.
The history of Holocaust does not permit a single administrative key. Jews fled from town to town, were registered elsewhere, and were attached to transports departing from other localities. A Jew born in Jedwabne who fled to Łomża and was deported from Zambrów did not cease to be a Jew of Jedwabne because the train left from Zambrów. The German apparatus itself severed the link among place of origin, registration, arrest, and murder. A memorial that classifies each victim by the final point of deportation reproduces, unintentionally, the administrative perspective of the persecutors. Commemoration may use administrative records, but it is not obliged to adopt their categories as the exclusive framework for deciding who a victim was. Membership in a community is not determined by the address of residence on the day of deportation.
Raphael Lemkin’s distinction is decisive here. Genocide is not only mass killing but the destruction of a group as a group, of its institutions, culture, leadership, religion, education, and family. The community stones express exactly this dimension. They commemorate not only the dead, but also the destruction of the frameworks within which life existed. It does not follow that every destroyed community deserves a stone at Treblinka; every site requires boundaries. But the argument refutes the claim that the only legitimate boundary is the place where most members of the community died. The boundaries of the site were in fact determined historically through a combination of proximity to the camp, the scale of deportation, the prominence of the community, the knowledge available at the time, initiatives by former residents, and symbolic decisions. That the criteria were not uniform is not a defect to be remedied by deleting two stones. It is a feature of the site that requires explanation.
The Facts Concerning Jedwabne and Radziłów
It must be stated without hesitation: most of the Jews of Jedwabne and Radziłów were not murdered at Treblinka. They were murdered in the summer of 1941, before the camp existed, after the Germans entered the region, and with the active participation of local Poles. In Jedwabne, many were burned alive in a barn, and a devastated massacre also took place in Radziłów. A minority survived the initial killings and passed through concentration points, transit camps, and ghettos. Some probably reached Treblinka, but there is no basis for claiming that they were numerous or that the camp was the principal site of the communities’ destruction. The scholarship allows these events to be described accurately, and it establishes both that they were not a German operation carried out without local participation and that they must not be detached from the German occupation and the broader campaign of persecution that rapidly escalated into mass murder.
These facts are the condition of the entire argument. A position that retains the stones but refuses to state how the communities were murdered would be historically and morally deficient.
The name engraved on a stone does not deny the pogroms. It becomes misleading only when the site provides no interpretive key. The museological obligation is therefore to remove the ambiguity, not the historical object. Retained and explained, the stones demonstrate that the destruction of Polish Jewry followed no single route, while forcing visitors to also confront the complicity of the local population. By removing them, we would once again sever the pogroms from the central narrative of the Holocaust, and names that have become symbols of the reckoning over Polish-Jewish relations would vanish from a site visited by hundreds of thousands.
The Arguments for Removal and Their Refutation
1. The stones assert a historical error, and removal merely restores the truth
The name “Radziłów” contains no sentence. It does not state that the Jewish community of Radziłów was murdered here. To call the stone an error, one must therefore first assign it a single, exclusive meaning, and this is precisely what proponents of removal do. They invoke an “original definition,” according to which the community stones were intended, from the outset, solely for communities destroyed at Treblinka, so that any name failing this test violates the founding rule of the site.
No such rule was ever laid down. It appears in no planning document and in no decision in the site’s history. The 1961 formulations, adopted at the initiative of the Jewish Historical Institute, spoke of places from which groups of murdered Jews had been deported, without any threshold or majority test. The expansion of the 1990s went further and explicitly defined the stones as testimony to the very existence of vanished communities. The “original definition” now invoked is a retroactive construction, created for the purpose of the present demand. A narrower criterion may legitimately be proposed today, but only as what it is: a present-day conceptual change. However, doing so requires an open discussion and meticulous consideration of the decision’s implementation, rather than the restoration of a rule that never existed.
The remaining justifications fare no better. Removal, it is said, is not erasure. Yet once the stones are gone, the names cease to be part of the commemorative arrangement, and the traces of the Jewish initiative that added them disappear with them. That is erasure, whatever its declared purpose. Nor can “respect for the victims” carry the argument:. Respect can be invoked with equal force for stating precisely where people were murdered and for refusing to strike the name of their community from the site, and a concept that supports both conclusions supports neither. Furthermore, the precedents cited from other former German annihilation camps, such as Auschwitz, where inflated victim tolls or wording concealing the victims’ Jewish identity were corrected, do not apply here. There, an explicitly false historical fact was replaced by an accurate one; here, there is no false fact to correct. The historical truth at Treblinka includes the fact that the stones were added through a Jewish initiative and acquired public meaning over decades. Removal in the name of one truth would suppress the other.
Alois Riegl’s distinction settles the point: beyond its intended commemorative value, an object acquires historical value as evidence of a period and its conceptions. The professional solution is not to erase 1964 or 1998, but to show how 2026 reads them. James E. Young called this the “life of the monument after its creation”. A monument’s meaning is not fixed once and for all by an artist or an institution but is continually recreated in encounters with visitors, ceremonies, and controversies. A living site must bear the history of its own life. Removal would create the illusion that the site had always conformed to current scholarship, replacing one anachronism with another. Genuine development would turn the stones from a source of ambiguity into a focus of interpretation.
2. The number of victims is negligible, commemoration belongs at the pogrom sites, and the stones obscure Polish responsibility
The premise might hold up numerically, but it remains fundamentally irrelevant. The stones were never intended as proportional representation; had they been, the field would be a demographic map. Even if it were proven that not one Jew of the two towns died at Treblinka, the question would remain whether the stones had acquired historical status as part of the monument.
The debate over whether one, five, or one hundred Jews from Jedwabne and Radziłów were murdered at Treblinka becomes decisive only if one first accepts that entitlement to a stone depends on a body count at the site, an assumption that is morally untenable and should be rejected outright. The museological question and the question of memory are broader than the genealogical one. Nor is memory a system of territorial jurisdiction. The Jews of Warsaw are commemorated in the former Ghetto area, at the Umschlagplatz memorial, at Treblinka, and beyond. As for obscuring responsibility, the danger is real only as long as the site remains silent. An explicit statement that the communities were destroyed principally through local murder turns the stones into evidence that the extermination was not uniform and obliges visitors to confront local Polish participation. The preferable solution is a nexus of memory. The stones remain, and the explanation directs visitors to the history of the pogroms, and the controversy surrounding their commemoration. Treblinka would thus not overshadow other memorial sites in the localities where the atrocities took place, but rather point toward them, creating a network of complementary sites, the only framework capable of presenting the historical process in its full complexity.
Aleida Assmann’s distinction between active memory and the archive states the institutional duty precisely. A responsible institution of memory does not reduce what it preserves to what the present wishes to emphasize. A monument cleansed in every generation of inconvenient layers is not alive, only continually rewritten.
3. Survivors support removal, and the decision is professional
Survivor testimony is irreplaceable, and memorial institutions must listen to it. But there is no single survivor voice. It was representatives of Polish Jewish émigrés who initiated the addition of the stones in the 1990s. Setting present-day survivor organizations against the Jewish initiators of the earlier commemoration, as though only one side were authentic, is untenable. Both are part of the history of memory, and no single group holds a veto over a public memorial that has become historical and artistic heritage. Responsibility for such a site is shared among survivors, scholars, conservation experts, community representatives, artists, public institutions, and future generations. Erasing part of a monument is also a pedagogically bankrupt answer to the problem of visitor confusion. It teaches visitors nothing about the pogrom, local participation, or the relationship between local murder and the extermination camps. It merely eliminates the possibility of misunderstanding by removing the subject from view. A decision of this kind demands transparency about why two stones, and only these two, were selected, and why the alternative of explanation was rejected. No such transparency has been offered.
Yad Vashem’s Intervention
Yad Vashem’s intervention in this controversy must be named for what it is: an attempt to decide by institutional decree a question it has neither the authority nor the disciplinary competence to decide. In a letter to the Minister of Culture and National Heritage the Chairman of Yad Vashem declares that the stones were “by definition” intended for communities destroyed at the site, a definition that appears in no document of the site’s history, brands the presence of Jedwabne and Radziłów a historical error, and stamps removal as a professional and moral necessity. “By definition” is not scholarship. It is decree. It substitutes institutional authority for evidence and forecloses, in advance, a museological, artistic, and historical debate.
Yad Vashem is a state institution whose commemorative message has been, from its inception, ideologically rigid and unidirectional, and it acts here in the service of that agenda. It elevates the letter of one organization to the status of “the survivors’ voice” while erasing the Jewish voice that initiated the stones in the 1990s, because that voice does not fit the required conclusion. It converts expertise in the destruction of two communities into supreme authority over a Polish monument, a work of art, and a landscape of memory that lie entirely outside its jurisdiction. An institution wielding such authority should have exercised restraint. Instead, it has turned its authority into a substitute for argument. A state memorial institution that wishes to be treated as a scholarly authority must argue like one: with evidence, with transparency, and with respect for the disciplines it presumes to overrule. On every one of these counts, its intervention here fails.
In the contemporary Polish debate about the German occupation period and the annihilation of Polish Jewry, this approach is especially problematic. Jedwabne and Radziłów are not two random names among hundreds; they stand at the center of Poland’s deepest reckoning over participation in the murder of Jews, and their removal will be read politically whatever its stated motive.
Recommendations
The two stones should be left in place. Their presence forms part of the commemorative arrangement at Treblinka as it developed over decades, and part of the history of both Jewish and Polish commemoration. Beside them, or at an appropriate point on the visitor route, an explanation should state that most of the Jews of Jedwabne and Radziłów were murdered in acts of local violence in the summer of 1941, under German occupation and with the participation of local Poles. The present controversy should itself be documented in full: the correspondence, the assessments, and the decisions should be preserved in the site’s archive and made accessible to scholars.
A scholarly catalog of all the stones should be prepared, recording for each name the community’s history, known deportation routes, the year and initiator of its addition, and the degree of certainty of its connection to Treblinka, and published digitally and in the museum’s visitor or educational center. The future Wall of Names should be treated as a complement, not a substitute. The wall restores individuals while the stones represent communal frameworks and the history of commemoration. The two can be connected through a digital interface enabling searches by place of birth, place of residence, and the ghetto in which a person lived before deportation. Educational materials should present the two stones as a case study: how a community is destroyed in stages, how historical knowledge changes, the role of neighbors in murder, and how memorial sites confront their own errors. Guides should present the stones not as an embarrassment to be passed over quickly, but as one of the most instructive case studies the site possesses.
Conclusion
This controversy is not a confrontation between historical truth and commemorative rigidity, but between two conceptions of truth at memorial sites: one demanding a one- to-one correspondence between each name and a place of destruction, the other understanding a memorial as a multilayered historical record. Worthy memorial sites are not required to be free of contradictions. They are required to be honest about them. Treblinka should state plainly that most members of the two communities were murdered in pogroms, and that the stones were added later and that their meaning has changed over time. Presenting all these facts is not a compromise between scholarship and memory. It is the fullest form of historical truth.
The correct decision, professional, historical, and moral, is therefore to retain the stones, provide them with a clear critical framework, and make the controversy itself part of the story the site tells: not erasure but clarification, not the obscuring of local responsibility but its explicit presentation, not a catalog of killing sites but a symbolic cemetery and a historical map of communities, deportations, murder, and memory. Nothing in this diminishes Treblinka’s status as the place where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered. It allows the site to present, more fully, the range of ways in which the Jewish world was destroyed, and the continuing struggle over how that destruction is remembered.
Prof. Daniel Blatman
July 22, 2026
Prof. (Emeritus) Daniel Blatman | פרופ׳ (אמריטוס) דניאל בלטמן
The Haber Chair in Contemporary Jewry and Holocaust Studies | הקתדרה לחקר השואה ויהדות זמננו ע״ש מקס וריטה הייבר
Faculty of Humanities | הפקולטה למדעי הרוח | Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem 9190501
dany.blatman@gmail.com