In 1942 between 254,000 – 265,000 Jews passed through the Warsaw Umschlagplatz on their way to the Treblinka extermination camp during Operation Reinhard,[1] the deadliest phase of the Holocaust in Poland.

[4] Other examples of Umschlagplatz include the one at Radogoszcz station - adjacent to the Łódź Ghetto - where people were sent to Chełmno extermination camp and Auschwitz.

In January 1943 Heinrich Himmler received the Korherr Report, a statistical calculation on how many Jews remained in Europe; it made clear that people passed through the Umschlagplatz and that no other terminology would be employed.

[11] During the Grossaktion Warsaw, which began on 22 July 1942, Jews were deported in crowded freight cars to Treblinka twice daily, in the early morning, often after an overnight wait, and in mid-afternoon.

An estimated 300,000 Jews were taken to the Treblinka gas chambers; some sources describe it as the largest killing of a community in World War II.

[12] The Warsaw Umschlagplatz was created by fencing off a western part of the Warszawa Gdańska freight train station that was adjacent to the ghetto.

Famed Polish pianist, Władysław Szpilman, would survive the ordeal by being pulled out of the crowds that were being loaded onto a train heading towards Treblinka.

On 18 April 1988, on the eve of the 45th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a stone monument resembling an open freight car was unveiled to mark the Umschlagplatz.

The inscription on four commemorative plaques in Polish, Yiddish, English and Hebrew reads: Along this path of suffering and death over 300 000 Jews were driven in 1942-1943 from the Warsaw Ghetto to the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps.The 400 most popular Jewish-Polish first names, in alphabetical order from Aba to Żanna, are engraved on the monument.

The gate is surmounted by a syenite grave stone (donated by the government and society of Sweden) with a motif of a shattered forest – a symbol of the extermination of the Jewish nation.