Treblinka directions

A further leg on good roads ended with such abruptness it was very difficult to fathom. All of a sudden we were on the worst roads we had frankly ever ridden on anywhere. How was this possible?
The GPS eventually began having spasms and heart attacks in response to our location. It was as though we were being led to a dark uninviting place. Regardless I followed the instructions and took a left turn onto a dirt road which eventually led to a sealed road with farms and residential homes along the full length of the road till we hit a dead end.
We'd noticed people walking around on their properties glaringly taking note as we the invaders interrupted the calm and quiet of the little country hamlet.
Frustration set in, anger set in and a sense of "we don't really want to be here but we know we have to, so where the hell is our destination?"
After hitting the dead end of the street we turned around and pulled over to assess our next move. It's interesting if you take note, we were travelling on the left side of the road as we do in Australia or England. The opposite is true in Europe and indeed Poland but doing it here just felt right.
Sol began relating his father's experiences in a nervous anger..."my father was in Treblinka I known also as the pits". This was early days for the Final Solution where Jews were sent by train from Warsaw and many other parts of Poland to be stripped of clothing, all their belongings including suitcases and more. The Nazis and their collaborators had dug large pits using slave labour Jews and other political prisoners. The hero Nazis and their Ukranian buddies sent a number of Jews into the pits, shot them and immediately covered the bodies with lime and sand with shovel loads. The next group of victims was then summoned and shot, day in day out. More pits were dug, more victims murdered and so on.
Sol related that his father had escaped when he hid in one of the trains destined to return to Warsaw where more Jews would be loaded into the cattle cars for a similar fate in the Treblinka pits.
Sol's father however jumped from the train early on in its return journey to Warsaw while several of his comrades who had also jumped from the train were machine gunned by Nazi guards sitting on the roof of the cattle car.
Sol's father survived and indeed was the ONLY survivor of Treblinka I because he had jumped in the opposite direction to his friends. They had basically drawn straws as to who would jump where.
His father made his way back to Warsaw at night time for many weeks of walking by foot where his life was really worth very little if he came across the wrong people during his journey.
He was meant to live.
For us, on our powerful motorcycles riding in 2014 Poland the risks were minimal and indeed almost zero in comparison to what the "greatest generation" had to endure during this war.
Our guardian angels smiled on us once again. As Sol and I were exchanging profanities about the local Poles coming out of their houses to see who was disrupting their calm I noticed a woman in a farm house several hundred meters from where we had stopped to talk.
I was nasty and angry at this stage saying "let's ask the fat Polack for directions".
We rode up to the woman and turned off our engines. My whole demeanor changed when I looked into her eyes and saw a very genuine, kind looking person with a large Christian cross around her neck.
We don't speak or understand Polish but I motioned to her "Treblinka Camp?" I also closed my eyes and tilted my head so she would understand I was looking for where people had passed away.
She immediately understood and began talking so much that we were overwhelmed. I understood a few words when she mentioned and number and the word kilometers. She had motioned us to go left at the end of her road where we had actually come in off the road.
She also pointed to her cross and opened her arms as wide as possible. We didn't fully understand but believed there would be some sort of cross at the location we were looking for.
I thanked her and waved goodbye as we rode off. She was put in our path to help us find our destination, of that I am 100% certain. Her face told the story perfectly and her kindness was something I will never forget.
I felt terrible that I had been disrespectful even though we never did this to her face to face. I learned a valuable lesson that day. Don't let your anger or feelings cloud your judgement about individual people till you actually interact with them.
This is something I have always done, but on this occasion I had not followed my own rules and regretted it deeply.