The memorial sites associated with Operation Reinhardt are primarily the former death camps: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. None of these were commemorated in the first years after the war. Sometimes, however, survivors who returned to their cities and towns commemorated the victims of camp liquidation operations, secured the mass graves against desecration and digging, and erected matzevot and information boards. In general, however, they left their hometowns soon afterwards. The last surviving Jews left most of the villages affected by Operation Reinhardt still in the second half of the 1940s. Consequently, there were no longer any depositories of Holocaust memory there, and the hastily installed memorials were destroyed in the following years.
The first changes in the memory of the Holocaust occurred in the 1960s. It was then that the first memorials were erected in the Operation Reinhardt camps. In 1963, a rectangular monument was unveiled in Belzec, which used to be a container for human remains. Two years later, a ceremony was held to unveil a memorial at Sobibor – a mound on a base of 50 metres in diameter covering the area where the mass graves were located. In addition, a sculpture depicting two haggard prisoners was created in Belzec and that of a mother and child in Sobibor. Fragments of both memorials were incorporated into the future museums created on the sites of the two camps. In turn, the monument at Treblinka was unveiled in 1964, which, as at Sobibor, covered the area of mass graves. In addition to a massive structure of granite blocks, the memorial consists of stones on which the names of the towns and countries from which the victims came are engraved. In addition, some structures have been built to mark individual places in the camp, such as the gate and the ramp. In this phase of commemorating Operation Reinhardt, the victims were generally referred to in very general terms – for example, as ‘victims of Nazi terror’. Saying that the term ‘victims of terror’ included mainly Jews was avoided in Polish politics of history.
In 2004, a new memorial site was opened at Belzec, which is both a marking and protection of the area where the human remains are located. A building was also built to house an exhibition on the history of the camp. The memorial at Belzec was created as a result of a collaboration between the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Polish Council for the Protection of Remembrance of Combat and Martyrdom. At Sobibor, a similar initiative came much later. The cooperation of Polish, Israeli, Dutch, Slovak, and German institutions resulted in the creation of a museum and educational building, as well as a new memorial site. The exhibition was opened in 2019 and the new memorial in 2023. Unlike previous memorial practices at these sites, the new displays provide information about the fact that it was almost exclusively Jews that died in the death camps. At Treblinka, work on a new exhibition space is still ongoing. Some smaller commemorative signage has been placed at the post-camp sites, yet they court controversy as recalling Poles saving Jews (without mentioning those who persecuted them) and using Christian symbolism.
The history of sites where mass murders took place and from where the victims were transported to the camps has also taken various turns, and the state of their commemoration varies greatly. While some victims’ graves are well protected and marked, and have been repaired many times, others are not marked at all or they found themselves in a terrible state. Information on the stations from which the victims were transported to the death camps is rare. Equally sporadic are the commemorations of the forced labour camps to which some of the victims were deported.
The memory of Operation Reinhardt is therefore concentrated in places where most people died. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, however, lie in peripheral areas. They are difficult to reach by public transport and there are few signposts leading to these memorial sites. This creates the impression that the Holocaust took place somewhere far away, behind the walls and fences of the camps, out of sight of the non-Jewish inhabitants of occupied Poland – primarily Poles, but also Ukrainians or Lemkos. The memory of the Jewish genocide outside the camps is almost absent. When it does appear – as at the Ulm Museum in Markowa – it is focused on the issue of Poles rescuing Jews. Nevertheless, the dates of ghetto liquidations and deportations carried out during Operation Reinhardt are often chosen by local activists concerned with the memory of the Jewish community in their localities as important anniversaries in the calendar of commemorations. Various events such as remembrance marches or ceremonies at cemeteries and mass graves are organised.