Treblinka (Polish pronunciation: [trɛˈblʲinka]) was a Nazi extermination camp in occupied Poland during World War II near the village of Treblinka in the modern-day Masovian Voivodeship of Poland. The camp, which was constructed as part of Operation Reinhard, operated between 01942-07-23July 23, 1942 and 01943-10-19October 19, 1943. During this time, approximately 870,000 men, women and children were killed at Treblinka. This figure includes more than 800,000 Jews, as well as an undetermined number of Romani people.

The camp, which was operated by the SS and Eastern European Trawnikis, consisted of Treblinka I and II. The first camp was a forced-labour center. Inmates worked in either the nearby gravel pit or irrigation area. Between June 1941 and July 23, 1944, more than half of its 20,000 inmates died from execution, exhaustion, or mistreatment.

Treblinka II was designed as a death factory. The small number who were not killed immediately became Sonderkommandos. These slave labor groups were forced to bury the victims' bodies in mass graves. Later corpses were burned on massive open-air pyres.

Extermination camps (or death camps) were camps built by Nazi Germany during the Second World War (1939–45) to systematically kill millions of people by gassing and extreme work under starvation conditions. While there were victims from many groups, Jews were the main targets. This genocide of the Jewish people was the Third Reich's "Final Solution to the Jewish question". The Nazi attempts at Jewish genocide are collectively known as the Holocaust.

In 1942, the Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler ordered the Lublin District SS- und Polizeiführer Odilo Globocnik to build the first extermination camps during Aktion Reinhard (1941–43), the operation to annihilate every Jew in the General Government (occupied Poland). Initially, the victims' corpses were buried in mass graves, but later were cremated. After Russian forces began to advance, previously buried victims were also exhumed and burned in Sonderaktion 1005, a Nazi attempt to destroy evidence of the Holocaust.

The first concentration camps were under the direct command of SS–Polizei-führer Globocnik, and operated by SS Police battalions and Trawnikis—volunteers from Eastern Europe; whereas the SS-Totenkopfverbände managed the Nazi Concentration Camps such as Dachau and Ravensbrück. The Nazis did not expect the majority of prisoners taken to the Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor extermination camps to survive more than a few hours beyond arrival.

Yevgeny Kutik (born 1985) is a Russian-American concert violinist whose career debuted in 2003 with an appearance with the Boston Pops and Maestro Keith Lockhart, an honor awarded to him as the 1st prize recipient of the Boston Symphony Orchestra Young Artists Competition Since then, Kutik has appeared worldwide playing solo recitals and concertos with orchestras. He has also won numerous awards including the 2006 Salon de Virtuosi Grant, and the Tanglewood Music Center Jules Reiner Violin Prize. In addition to being a concert violinist, Kutik is also a keynote speaker/representative for the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) Speakers Bureau.

A native of Minsk, Belarus, Yevgeny Kutik immigrated to the United States at age five, and began violin lessons with his mother, Alla Zernitskaya, shortly thereafter. He then studied under the tutelage of the late Zinaida Gilels, and later Shirley Givens. Kutik later became a student of legendary violinist Roman Totenberg and famous pedagogue, Donald Weilerstein. Mr. Kutik holds a bachelor’s degree (cum laude) from Boston University and a master’s degree from the New England Conservatory in Boston where he makes his home.