On and Off the Beaten Path: Final article in a Special Three-Part Series on Poland and the Holocaust By Carole Bell Ford

Two—too many: the camps at Majdanek and Auschwitz.

con·cen·tra·tion camp,  n.

Nazi camp for exterminating prisoners: any of the prison camps used under the rule of Hitler in Nazi Germany. Conditions were inhuman. Prisoners, mostly Jews, were generally starved or worked to death or killed immediately, resulting in the death of eleven million people, six million of whom were Jews.

I did find other, more benign definitions. For example, we could say that the camps in which Japanese and Japanese Americans were interned during World War II were also concentration camps. But when the term is used today, very few think of anything other than the Nazi death camps.

On writing about the camps

 If you’ve been following this series, you know that I have been involved with research related to a particular group of women, Holocaust survivors, mostly from Poland. And it was a conference on Women in the Holocaust that took me to Poland, where I told “Lusia’s Story”. But when I planned the trip I wasn’t sure I wanted to visit the camps. I thought I’d seen enough at Dachau and Thereisenstadt. But as my husband, Steve, thoughtfully said: “If the women lived through the horror of the camps, can you say that it’s too difficult for you to bear?”

 I know that it is difficult even to read about how people endured the camps, but the details are not for the purposes of sensationalizing the experience. How can you sensationalize something for which “sensational” carries a trivial meaning? Something that even our most exploitative producers of violent films could not have conceived?  

Unfortunately, even with the details that bring you closer to an authentic understanding, as Lusia told me, the camps are “impossible to imagine.”

Majdanek

800,000 shoes found by Soviet troops in 1944.

Besides being unprofitable, the mass killings of the “Einsatzgruppen” were messy. After all, they did have to dispose of all those bodies; people who were being executed at the edge of huge, open pits. In the Ukraine at the Babi Yar gorge alone, nearly 34,000 Jews of Kiev and its suburbs were slaughtered, the very place that my father left in 1910. If he hadn’t, my father surely would have been among the victims who were systematically machine-gunned in what has been called “a two-day orgy of execution” on September 29 and 30, 1941. As many as 60,000 more people, including Roma and Soviet POWs were later shot at the site.

When the camp at Majdanek first opened, bodies were buried in mass graves. But from June 1942 on, execution in the camp was clearly more sanitary and efficient since the crematorium was up and running. Although, in addition to the more common gassings, there were some occasional mass executions. One, which took place on "Bloody Wednesday" in November, 1943, may have been the largest mass execution carried out at any of the concentration camps; the victims were the last remnants of the Jewish population in the Lublin district. (When we asked Krystyna, our Lublin quide, how many Jews lived there today, she said: “Seven or eight, not enough for a minyan,” the quorum that is needed for a Jewish religious service.)

What provoked the mass killing was that, in the autumn of 1943, the Nazis had been shocked by the Warsaw and Bialystok ghetto uprisings, by the resistance movement in the camps, and by the outright rebellions in the death camps at Sobibor and Treblinka. If the prisoners at Majdanek had a successful rebellion, they might have escaped into the forests where they would have joined the Polish partisans.

Executing 18,000 Jews took all day. SS guards, some brought to Majdanek from as far away as Auschwitz, took turns changing their posts throughout the day, stopping for a meal as new waves of Jews were ordered to lay in a ditch to be shot, over the ones who had been killed earlier. 

At first Majdanek held 2,000 Russian prisoners of war; actually they built the camp, spending the first winter in tents and makeshift shelters. At the end of their ordeal only 200 survived. Majdanek was chosen for the camp site because it was in a completely unsheltered area—fully exposed. It was unlike the extermination camp at Treblinka which is in a wooded area. And unlike Dachau with its high wall that hid the activities inside the camp. Nor was there a security zone around the camp, as there was at Auschwitz. The compound was surrounded by a double net of barbed wire suspended from tall poles and electrified by high voltage towers, guarded by Germans with automatic weapons.  People driving past while it was in operation had a completely unobstructed view of the camp, the gas chamber building and the smoke spewing from the tall brick chimney of the crematorium. They were only a few meters from the busy road—the main route to the eastern front for the German army. But being so open was an advantage; escape was very difficult. Remarkably, however, over its four years of existence, 512 inmates actually did escape.

Krystyna, took us to the site that is now a state museum. Most of the original camp was preserved since, immediately after the war, the Soviets used it as a detention camp for their political prisoners. Krystyna filled in details, and generally walked us through the grounds and former barracks that are used for the permanent exhibition of artifacts, and for illustrating conditions in the camp. The gas chambers, dissecting tables, crematorium, didn’t require elaborate explanation.

The photo above shows the ruined crematorium, as the Soviet troops found it. When the Germans fled the camp, they tried to burn the bodies of Polish political prisoners who had been executed the day before liberation. It is their charred remains that are shown in the foreground.

Prisoners brought from afar, exhausted from their brutal journeys, were marched to the camp from the train station, about 2 kilometers away. When they arrived at the camp—via a roadway paved with broken tombstones that had been removed from the Jewish cemetery for this purpose— they were taken to an assembly area sardonically nicknamed the “rose field”, rosenfeld, after a common Jewish name. There, the prisoners waited, no matter what the season, naked, having already been stripped of their belongings.

Then they went through the initial “selection,” a cynical mock-medical assessment during which the prisoners were supposedly assessed for their ability to work. Anyone who was sick or obviously suffering from advanced malnutrition, the very old, the very young, were immediately led to the gas chambers. They were rarely even registered. Those who survived the selection were separated from their families and sent to the barber, where their heads were shaved. And then to the baths—concrete troughs—where they were disinfected. First with very hot water, then with Lysol.

The unsheltered area in which the camp was built made it easier to control the prisoners, but it also meant that the camp was unsheltered from the bitter cold of the Polish winter and the often brutally hot summer. The barracks roofing did nothing to provide protection from the extremes of the weather. Of course, the buildings were not insulated, nor did they even have floors at first. The straw-covered dirt floors were replaced by floorboards when large numbers of prisoners began to arrive. Bunk beds were also constructed out of wooden planks, so that more and more people could be packed into the buildings. Sod and straw mattresses, and the thin blankets the prisoners were issued and which were passed on from year to year, became infected with lice, causing outbreaks of typhus. The inmates had one piece of clothing which became increasingly threadbare and soiled; no protection from the cold and rain. Sewage systems were not installed until 1943, leading to typhoid fever. These two diseases, typhus and typhoid, were almost constant in all of the camps. But it was malnutrition and harsh labor that led to what has been called, euphemistically, "accelerated natural death". 

 The inmates began their day at 5- 6 AM and usually worked until sundown. A typical daily food ration consisted of ersatz coffee for breakfast, a ladle of watery soup or a thick pulp made from coarse flour for lunch, and for supper—the main meal of the day—a small piece of bread, sometimes made with sawdust, and the same kind of coffee or herbal tea they had for breakfast. Twice a week there was a spoonful of beet jam, a piece of sausage, or some margarine. Sometimes, instead of bread, the prisoners got unpeeled potatoes.

The memorial to the victims of the brutal life in Majdanek is a huge, circular structure, appropriately located near the crematorium. As you walk up the steps you stand under the dome and see an enormous circular urn, shaped like an inverted saucer, which contains the ashes of some of the victims. They are mixed with a preparation that keeps them from blowing away in the wind. Here and there, you can see bone fragments.

The memorial bears an inscription.  The English translation reads: "Let our fate be a warning to you.”

The domed memorial at Majdanek

Majdanek was liberated in July1944 by Soviet troops pushing their way westward, toward Germany, the first to be liberated by the Allies. Knowing that the Soviets were approaching, the Nazis evacuated 15,000 prisoners in March and April 1944, transporting them westward by train to Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Ravensbrück, Natzwiler, Mauthausen or Plaszow. The last 1,000 prisoners were marched off on foot only the day before the liberation. About 1500 remained behind because they were too crippled or sick to join the march. The Nazis were so obsessed by this point in the war, they jeopardized their own retreat in order to be sure the Jews would not survive.

Although by that time the Allied governments, if not the people in those countries, knew about the death camps. But this was the first time there was direct evidence of the gas chambers and crematoria. The troops were so outraged, they forced Polish citizens from the surrounding region to tour the camp.

Polish citizens viewing the crematorium after liberation.

It is not well know that the first Allied war crimes trial took place in the Polish Special Penal Court in Lublin before the end of the war—six men who had been captured during the liberation of the Majdanek camp were convicted.

Auschwitz

            We passed through interesting countryside on the trip from Lublin to Krakow, where the conference was being held at the Jagellonian University; as I wrote previously, the university in which Copernicus studied. The drive was through an attractive and popular tourist region, the Małopolska, close to the foothills of the Tatra Mountains. But otherwise the trip was similar to the one from Lodz to Lublin—very slow. It took us 7 hours to travel about 150 miles, with only one brief stop for lunch, and another to look at a remarkable 13^th century Romanesque abbey in Koprzywnica.

           Krakow—bands playing the streets, festooned with banners and flowers for the celebration of Corpus Christi, a major holiday in Poland—was in stark contrast to the small, neat town of Oświęcim. It is known to the world by its German name, Auschwitz, for the extermination camps that made the horrors of Majdanek pale by comparison. It is very difficult to describe Auschwitz although, from photos and films such as Schindler’s List, it is probably the best-known and most familiar of all of the concentration camps.

           It was overwhelming, a monstrosity, in every respect.

           Overwhelming in its size—actually three huge camps, Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III (which was a slave labor camp and chemical factory). Because there were so many prisoners in Auschwitz and to keep track of them, instead of putting numbers on their clothing, the Germans decided to tattoo numbers on their arms. When you see survivors with such numbers, you know they are survivors of Auschwitz.

          Overwhelming in its cynicism—the familiar image of the main gate which reads Arbeit Macht Frei, work makes you free. (Steve reminded me that we saw an identical entry many years ago in Dachau, I had forgotten.)

                        The main entry to Auschwitz

You can’t believe you’re in a place that was real, your mind just won’t accept it. Every aspect of the camp was horrifying—

            The railroad tracks.

            The ramp where the charade of “selections” by the Nazi doctors took place.

            Thousands of photographs of shaven-headed, stripe-suited inmates.

            Unused canisters of Zyklon B.

            The obscenity of troughs used as latrines.

            Unbearable barracks with dirt floors, pallets shared by ten people with a bit of straw for a mattress, roofs set on top without being sealed so that snow blew in during the bitter winters and it was stifling in the summer.

           The remains of millions of lives: human hair, some in bales; thousands of pairs of shoes; baby clothing; suitcases with names on them identifying the owners who had perished there; all left behind as the Germans fled.

The “selection” after arrival in cattle cars.

Women and children, separated in the “selection.” They were taken directly to the gas chambers.

           In Auschwitz I, the gas chambers and crematoria are intact. In Birkenau, they have collapsed and are in ruins. It was recently decided not to reconstruct them as a museum display but rather to leave them as they are, as a symbol.

           I try to understand how it could have happened, try to comprehend such places. But neither my intellect nor my imagination is sufficient, apparently, to understand how Majdanek and Auschwitz were constructed with the main purpose of carrying out the destruction of millions of people. For other camps—Chelmo, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor—it was their sole purpose. I can understand only abstractly, academically, how such hatred could have existed among so many people, and how others who didn’t share the hatred could have been so accommodating or indifferent. Some of my friends, for whom I have great respect as scholars, try to explain it. But it remains unfathomable to me.

           Go there. See if you will be able to accept an explanation for the insanity, the profound inhumanity, represented in these memorials to events that took place, not among ancient barbaric tribes, but within living memory.

           Auschwitz was a way station for Lusia. She was there briefly, after the Łódź ghetto was liquidated. From Auschwitz she was sent on to a slave labor camp and from there to Bergen-Belsen. But she has gone back to see the camps; a pilgrimage many survivors take. “To pay my respects,” Lusia says.

           Steve and I wept, we too paid our respects.

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