Majdanek

Sept. 29
Tuesday was the only bad weather we have had for this whole two week trip. After glorious warm sunshine in Kazimierz Dolny on Monday, we stepped out of our unfortunately cold apartment into a steady rain shower, Wendy with her rain gear and me with my umbrella. The apartment is cold because, as we are told, our apartment is heated by a common system, and they do not turn on the heat until it has been 11 degrees C. (52 F.) or below at 6 p.m. for three consecutive nights. So we find ourselves rooting for continued cold weather—last night we qualified, at 10.5 degrees C.

The part here about Majdanek is pretty depressing stuff, so feel free to skim and skip.

The rain did not continue long, so after a visit to a local mall and some business at UMCS, we made our way to the concentration camp SE of Lublin (at the time), Majdanek. Majdanek was not on the scale of Birkenau – Auschwitz, with the death toll being 78,000. But the exhibit offers an effective illustration of the inhumanity nonetheless. It’s one thing to know about the Holocaust from articles and books, even the first-person narratives such as This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen and Drohobycz, Drohobycz, or the histories, the photos and web sites, and even the museums such as the Washington Holocaust Museum. It’s another thing to walk on the grounds themselves, to see the mausoleum built over the mountain of human ashes, to walk through the crematorium (we decided not to include that photo) and surviving barracks which housed 500-800 prisoners, to see the large grounds now occupied mostly by Polish crows with a few magpies and incongruous partridges, and to get some feel of the enormity of what went on here. Collective insanity. I hope.






The memorial built here in 1969 is based thematically on Dante’s Inferno—“Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Better metaphor than the outright lie which greeted prisoners of Auschwitz, “Labor macht frei,” work makes [you] free. All the work done here kept human beings on starvation fare until typhoid or exhaustion or some kapo’s whim brought death, the last cash value of their bodies, and their bodies’ disposal. I can think of nothing more depressing than the cold texture of the concrete walls where so many were snuffed out. The memorial doesn’t show it at that distance, but it has something of the same crumbling stone texture.





We returned with relief via electric bus to the city and normal life. Maybe that’s all you can do, with the enormity of the war 65 years past, to return to ordinary life. We had the remains of a kebab sandwich with us, and gave that to a forlorn dog on the grounds. He seemed discouraged and didn’t show much interest in it.