Saturday, July 17, 2010

July 17, 2010






I am writing to you from Zamosc, Poland. We're about 90 minutes away from Lublin. Besides the hotel not having any air conditioning during an unseasonably warm weather spell throughout Europe, everything is great. We spent the majority of the day at Majdanek concentration camp; at least it feels that way even though we were there just over 3 hours. Majdanek is located about 10 minutes outside of Lublin. It is especially noteworthy for a few reasons. First, the camp served multiple purposes in its existence. The camp started out as a concentration camp for political prisoners. It then became a labor camp, ultimately morphing into a death camp. Many of the camps, such as Belzec, Birkenau and Chelmno were only built to murder Jews. Majdanek was liberated by the Russians in 1944. It is such a unique concentration camp because it is almost entirely preserved as the Germans abandoned it. For most of the concentration camps the Germans were able to sabotage the main traces of their mass murders; not so with Majdanek. Two gas chambers still remain today, along with the crematoriums.

We visited Bergen Belsen a few days ago. Visiting Majdanek was an entirely different experience because nothing remains at Bergen Belsen. Majdanek has been preserved throughout the years. Barracks, the gas chambers, the crematorium, guards' towers and so forth still stand today. The first things we noticed when we arrived at the front of Majdanek were the barbed wire and the posts. Many of these posts are the original ones that were installed by the Germans. Barbed wire surrounds the camp's perimeter in different levels. The wire was intended to keep inmates confined and to keep the Polish people away from the camp. Polish people who approached the wire or attempted to smuggle food to the camp inmates risked their lives. Many of the original wooden buildings still stand today.

If you've ever visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum you have seen the picture of the large pile of hair. At Majdanek there is a collection of human hair preserved in one of the storage barracks. When inmates were first taken to the camp part of selection involved having their heads shaved. During the camp's existence they collected 730 kg of hair. Hair was collected for mattresses and for slippers to be worn on submarines. Supposedly, wearing slippers made of human hair would be undetectable to sonar.

One of the most powerful exhibits at the USHMM is the overwhelming pile of shoes. Majdanek has an entire storage barrack full of shoes. When you walk into the storage building, shoes are gathered on all sides of the building, along with two large bins in the middle of the building. The reason so many shoes survive at Majdanek today is because it was a gathering point for luggage and other confiscated materials collected from prisoners there and other camps around the area. The shoes have been sprayed with oil to preserve them somewhat, but they are just held in with chicken wire. I walked along and stopped at a beige high heel shoe that caught my eye. I tried to picture the young woman who would have worn it and wondered why she would leave in shoes like that. It dawned on me that she probably didn't have a choice. Our director, Elaine, whose parents were at Auschwitz, and whose grandparents perished at Belzec, told me a story that her mother relayed to her about watching a young woman get off the train in a wedding dress. Her first thought was that - she came on her wedding day, her second thought was - there are still weddings?

Majdanek is unique because it still houses gas chambers as they stood when the Russians liberated the camp. Seeing the gas chambers up close was a very solemn experience. Up to 300 people could be gassed at once. The actual chambers are very compact; I can't even begin to fathom so many people in the chamber struggling to hold on for one last breath. We were able to look into the gas chamber, but were restricted from walking through. The walls were stained green from the chemicals. The heavy steel door closing off the chamber was still attached. If guards wanted to look in and observe the deaths, there was a peep hole for them to watch. Gas chambers were of course used to kill people, but they were also used to disinfect clothes. In a separate area, guards would put in inmate's clothes to disinfect the clothes using Zyklon B. Before Zyklon B was used to murder Jews it was a pesticide.

We were able to walk into one of the prisoner's barracks that held triple bunk beds - some could hold 3 or more people on each bench level, others held two (these were much narrower than a twin bed. It was hard to imagine 450-500 people living in this building. I tried to imagine the sounds and smells - anguish, mumbled prayers, cries of anger - old straw and filthy bodies and clothes.

After leaving the gas chambers and walking throughout the prisoner's barracks, we visited the crematorium. When you walk through this building you first see a room that houses a concrete slab. Before bodies were cremated someone would search the body to make sure there weren't any valuables left on the corpse, such as gold fillings, hidden jewelry and so forth. The German motto during this time was "nothing to be wasted." After a corpse was thoroughly inspected it was put in a storage room. This room also doubled as a place of execution for Polish people suspected of aiding prisoners and we could see the bullet holes in the wall. After this room we came to the crematorium. Multiple crematoriums still exist today. You can walk around the entire room and view each oven from the front and the back. It almost seemed too cold - these weren't baking ovens - they once held someone's mother or son. We had seen several small butterflies landing in the overgrown meadow in the roll call area. One was caught inside the crematorium room and kept hitting the window to be released. Though several of us tried, we were unable to help it to freedom - perhaps a symbol of the tragedy of that room.

On November 3rd, 1943 Nazis murdered 18,000 people in one day. As these murders were taking place, loudspeakers were set up around the area to play music in an attempt to distract people from the sounds of shooting and screaming. This massacre is referred to as ERNTEFEST, or the Harvest Festival. This massacre fell around the time of year that Germans traditionally celebrated a harvest festival. The memorial today includes the area where the murders took place, and a very large circular monument that contains the remains and ashes of the 18,000 murdered Jews. It was hard to realize that we were looking at the remains of so many. The inscription at the top of this monument read, "Let our fate be a warning to you." My roommate, Debi, lit a memorial candle and spoke about the importance of this camp to our students and our teaching.

It was as if we had entered another world - Bizarro - of the 150,000 people that went through the camp, 80,000 died there. People decided the fate for others.

Today was a long, hot and difficult day; however, I'm glad I had the opportunity to tour Majdanek. Today's visit demonstrates how important it is to use primary sources, such as the remnants of camps which still survive today to teach the Holocaust. But how to use what we saw today in our teaching - that's the key.

We then checked into a small hotel at Zamosc - a very quaint city with a large market square filled with small cafes with outside umbrellas. We rested for a few hours and went out for a short tour of this former lovely city that had a population of 12,500 Jews before the war - 43% of the population - today there is no longer a Jewish presence, though the Warsaw community is funding the renovation of the town's synagogue. We dined in the bowels of a local restaurant which we all loved, as it was quite cool in the lower basement. Tonight, though we don't know what we ate, we all enjoyed it immensely - starting with smoked salmon (which I am beginning to like), a sour green salad, and the main course of what seemed to me some type of golumpki, green beans, and boiled potatoes. We finished off with a sponge cake with apple filling and drizzled with chocolate which was surrounded by ice cream! Yum. After dinner we returned to the hotel to write in our blogs and download pictures. Many of us congregated in the bar where one of the participants, Margaret Atkinson, from Louisiana, had set up a Skype with some of her students. They asked us questions and we told them about our experiences. It was lots of fun for both teachers and students.

Tomorrow we head to Belzec concentration camp. The next few days will perhaps be the most difficult of the entire trip. We are all hoping that the heat wave breaks soon.

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