Majdanek - English version
MAJDANEK
As I already said in the previous blog, this one is going to be a bit different from my other blogs, so far. Usually, I would touch on history and politics while writing about some country, but in Poland, I really needed to divide history and my time there. If you are asking yourself why you will soon find out.
Thursday afternoon, we are driving from the center of Lublin to Majdanek. The concentration camp for people made and run by Nazi Germany. To make things even worse, Majdanek was not only a concentration camp, it was also an extermination camp. I was there one afternoon, maybe for 2 hours only, but what I saw and how I felt, it is really hard to describe with normal words. So I will go step by step, from the entrance to the exit.
While driving next to the camp, you only see the field, empty field, close to the city, with fence,
prickly fence of course... We parked the car and went to the first museum at the entrance. There were photos of people who were in camp, and some small multimedia materials, nothing too scary. Then we went to the Memorial at the "entry gate" to the camp. The symbolic Pylon is meant to represent mangled bodies. With the weather as it was, a bit dark, before the rain, it was very scary to see that.
Then we went to the car and drove us to the entrance of the barracks. There were many of them, and we were walking next to them, most of these barracks had some sort of their purpose there, today. In the first few there were photos of the camp before and after. Some of them had infographics about people who were there, how they were treated, and about attempts to escape Majdanek. One of the barracks was built as a museum, so we went into that one. There were a lot of pieces of belongings to prisoners there. It was quite hard to understand what was going in the head of the main responsible ones for these crimes. Also, there were some photos, just to say, kids under the age of 18 can not enter this museum. I did not really want to take photos here, maybe because of respect to those people who died here.
As we are continuing our walk, we went to one of the barracks, with a bit weird smell than others. All of them smelled like old, wet wooden constructions that will soon fall. Even tho they built this camp as a museum not so long ago, they really tried to make it original, and the smell that you can feel is really leaving an impression on each normal human being. So about that one, inside, there were 3huge boxes or containers, Idk how to even call it, but huge, huge. Inside them, were shoes, of people who were there, original, shoes, who were left on Majdanek after the Soviets destroyed it. It smelled so weird, it smelt like death, Piotr and me, we entered, been there for 2 seconds, and went out, with pain in our stomach.
As we are continuing to walk, I decided to take a photo, to maybe try to get feelings through photos, as it is really hard to express them like this. I took a photo that you can see down under, two layers of fence, that is at least 3 meters high, then every 100 meters, patrol, then the road, and after all of that, probably some soldiers, army and then again fence. I mean who the fuck can escape this shit and how?
We also saw some other barracks where we could see beds and how people were treated and kept, each Barack was supposed to have 250 people inside, but during the biggest wave of prisoners, each of them had 500-600, and then you ask yourselves, of course, you ask, million and one questions, without answer, without conclusion, without understanding...
The last part of our walk on Majdanek was the crematorium, there is nothing to write about it, just feeling when you enter is like, speechless, hard, dizzy, and your brain is trying to understand, but it can not. All you can is feel, and you feel, believe me, I can not know what you feel, if it is fear, or death, or sadness, it is impossible to describe that feeling inside me.
Next to the crematorium, there is Mausoleum erected in 1969 and contains ashes and remains of cremated victims, collected into a mound after the liberation of the camp in 1944.
There was a big hole there, so Germans took Jews one night, and told them to get naked, gave them shovels, and send them to do dig hole. The reason was that the Soviets were already close and they were expecting an attack on them. Of course, that was not the reason, after they dug that hole, they placed them inside and kill each of them with bullets, because there was no time, for gas chambers and showers, or crematorium, they just killed them there and left them inside that hole. From what I read there and what I saw there Polish people were treated the same way, Soviets who were captured fighting against the Nazis, as well.
The original idea of the camp was the prison for Poles who wanted to do resistance, for soldiers of Soviet Union, and then later, as Lublin had Ghetto, they took all Jews and started killing them as well.
Official numbers are saying that in camp, there were 150.000 people and that 78.000 were killed. By some Polish investigations and Soviets post-war, numbers are going over a million people, who went through this camp.
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