Wednesday July 2, 2008: Majdanek

Dear Family and Friends:

Today your children visited the Old City of Lublin, home to a very famous Yeshiva. They witnessed a bustling town, both then and now, that was once home to a very large Jewish community. After visiting the Great Yeshiva of Lublin and learning about the religious life of the many Jewish communities of Poland, your children gained an understanding of the nature of so many Jewish communities in Poland prior to the Holocaust.

Most Polish Jews were very religious, spoke Yiddish, and had established their own communities and agencies within the larger cities or even smaller towns of Poland. In contrast the Jews of Western Europe, including Germany, were far more secular and assimilated. They spoke the language of the country where they resided and they experienced high rates of intermarriage. Their nationality (German, French, Dutch, etc.) often preceded their religion in rank of importance; not so, for the Jews of Poland.

Following their visit to Lublin your children went to what I believe has to be one of the darkest places on earth. At Treblinka they saw a memorial to the camp. In Treblinka grass now grows and there are beautiful forests. Treblinka was hidden from the cities and placed deep in the countryside and the forest.

Majdanek is a concentration camp and an extermination camp that is located on the Southern outskirts of the city of Lublin. It is in full view! Originally established in 1941 for prisoners of war, it was soon turned into a camp for Jews with a maximum capacity of 35,000 inmates. All transports to the Camp consisted mainly of Jews and to a lesser extent, Poles. The first groups of Jews arrived from Slovakia followed by Bohemia and Moravia and then Poland. Early in 1943 Dutch and Greek Jews also arrived. Polish Jews mostly came from Warsaw and Bialystock and Lublin.

Altogether about 800,000 were sent to Majdanek in 1942-43 of whom about 60 percent were women and children, the sick and the elderly, and were either shot or gassed upon arrival. By November 1943 an addition 37,000 victims had either succumbed to the unbearable living conditions or to sadistic treatment by Camp guards. Until the spring of 1942 prisoners were usually shot in a nearby forest, but afterwards two of the camps four Zyklon B gas chambers were used and the bodies were then cremated.

Toward the end of 1943 a strong partisan movement developed in the Lublin district. At the same time the Jewish prisoners of the death camp of Sobibor revolted. In retaliation the Germans carried out a massacre euphemistically named the Harvest Festival of 42,000 Jews, some of whom had been brought from the nearby work camps. This “action” included the machine gunning of 18,000 Jews in a single day (November 3, 1943) I front of the ditches that the victims were made to dig to serve as their own graves.

When the camp was liberated by the advancing Soviet armies (July, 1944) only a few hundred prisoners were still alive.

In 1947 the Polish authorities established a museum and research institute at Majdanek. With the exception of many of the barracks, which were dismantled at the approach of the army, the rest of the camp remains today much as it was on the last day of operation.

For more information on Majdanek visit: http://www.cympm.com/majdanekcitysuburbs.html


My Personal Reflections:

When one sees Majdanek there are so many unthinkable moments. One is struck by the devastating notion that man can be so incredibly evil and most cannot but help wonder about the following among many other things:

First, the Commandant’s house, located next to the gas chambers. Here, the commandant and his family, including his many, many children, lived within a few hundred feet of the gas chambers. The children played in the yard as prisoners arrived and as victims, women and children, stood in the lines waiting to enter the gas chambers.

Next, the camp is extremely close to the city of Lublin—a large bustling city. Even today, apartment buildings have been built where one’s central view from the apartment balcony is of the camp. When I was at Majdanek I could hear radios playing from these apartments as I walked through the barracks. I was amazed that any one would build apartments so close to the camp even if they were built after the Shoah. Because of the camp’s proximity to the city, one also realizes that those who were sent to Majdanek were first brought by trains that stopped at the train station in the heart of the City of Lublin. Unlike Treblinka or Auschwitz, the trains did not pull directly into the camps, where they were out of view. It was obvious that the residents of Lublin had to have been eyewitnesses to what was going on; there was no way to deny this fact. They had to see the thousands of people arriving daily with suitcases in hand walking through the city and into the camp. They had to smell the burning flesh.

Finally the reality of the gas chambers in Majdanek and the crematoriums, left totally in tact as they were then, are very hard to comprehend—factories of death to kill human beings in the 20th century. As you approach the gas chambers, written above the doorway are the words, “Bath and Disinfection.” After being in ghettos, traveling on cramped trains for hours and even days, and being subjected to many other horrific circumstances, those who arrived here were lead to believe that they were going to a work camp and would have the opportunity to shower and clean up. To make sure everyone remained calm, they were told to enter the room marked Bath and Disinfection, and it was here that they encountered hooks for their clothing, a place to put their shoes, and actual showerheads. There they were asked to undress and remove their clothes, men, women and children together, while Nazi guards looked on intentionally humiliating all. Once undressed, water really did come out of these shower heads. However, after showering, they then were asked to move into the next room where they were told they would be deloused.

When you enter this room and stand there with others, you feel nervous, anxious, and you can see with your own eyes the cement walls that held thousands and thousands of people-- covered with scratch marks of those who tried to survive the gas.

Jewish prisoners of the camp were forced to remove the bodies from the chambers and take them to the crematoriums on the opposite end of the camp.

Next to these many ovens in Majdanek one cannot help but notice a porcelain bath tub. It was here that the commandant of the camp would bathe. The heat from the ovens provided him with a hot bath and a warm sauna. This was the mentality of the incredibly sadistic Guards of these Camps.

After touring the entire camp, and after seeing barracks filled with shoes--shoes, shoes and more shoes, one is struck by the magnitude of loss. One also wonders about the individual--who were the persons who walked in the high heeled shoes, the baby shoes, the heavy boots, the torn-up flats?

At the end of the camp is a stadium-size mound of human ash and bones, piled high and wide. It is covered by a tremendous dome. It was established as a memorial to those murdered at the Camp. It is virtually unimaginable to comprehend how many were killed when just one handful of ash is the equivalent of one human body.

Visiting Majdanek is grueling. It is a horrible place and one that reflects the magnitude of the Holocaust. Tonight your students will have an opportunity to talk about what they witnessed and to share their feelings with their guides, their educators, and with each other.

As soon as I hear from your children with quotes about their experiences today, I will forward them to you.

All the best,
Barb