Archaeologists have unearthed never previously seen items from the site of the Treblinka death camp in eastern Poland, where 900,000 people, mostly Jews, were systematically killed during the Holocaust, NBC News reported. The excavation, which was done on a small scale and in the least invasive way possible out of respect for those who perished in Treblinka, was led by archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls, of Staffordshire University in the U.K. "There are some questions that can only be answered by archaeology. As we enter, unfortunately, an age without survivors, archaeology can provide much more new evidence." Treblinka, the Nazis' second-biggest death camp after Auschwitz-Birkenau, operated until 1943, when the Germans shut it down and erased the evidence of its existence. Using minimally invasive technologies including special lasers, archaeologists discovered chilling reminders of what transpired in Treblinka 70 years ago. The findings included human bones, and broken tiles carved with a Star of David. Several survivors of the camp have previously said that the Nazis disguised the gas chambers as a mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath. The finding of the tiles corroborates their statements and provides physical evidence of the gas chambers. Sturdy Colls believes that the discoveries at Treblinka could silence the claims of Holocaust deniers. "They [the Nazis] did a very good job of hiding it, but in actual fact, they didn't 'sterilize' this landscape. They weren't that efficient," she said. The findings will be shown on Saturday on a Smithsonian Channel special program called "Treblinka: Hitler's Killing Machine."
Credit: Smithsonian Channel
"The ethical dimension of the work that I do is really important to me," Sturdy Colls told NBC News.
