Franciszek Ząbecki

Lieutenant Franciszek Ząbecki (; 8 October 1907 – 11 April 1987)

Burning perimeter of Treblinka camp during the prisoner uprising of 2 August 1943. A clandestine photograph taken by Ząbecki.

On 4 September 1939, during the German invasion of Poland he reported to the Communication Battalion of the Polish Army in Zegrze as the reserve (plutonowy). He was released on 29 March 1941 for medical reasons and returned to Sokołów. Being a railwayman from before the invasion, he was put to work at the nearby Treblinka station on . There he secretly joined the resistance under the nom-de-guerre "Dawny" (the old-timer in Polish) and was asked by the Armia Krajowa (AK) to keep a watch on the German rail transports passing through the station. This intelligence became crucial following the German attack on Russian positions in occupied eastern Poland. He was one of only a few non-German witnesses of all Jewish transports thereafter, until the liquidation of the Treblinka death camp, with the last Jewish forced laborers sent to be murdered at the Sobibor extermination camp in five covered wagons on 20 October 1943. Even though these estimates have been revised by others in the following decades, his book is still one of the leading sources of information for professional historians about the mass deportations to Treblinka from the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland, their frequency, and volume.