Updated because of earlier grammatical errors
Day four and we continue our road trip through Poland.
Clearly our objective is to learn as much as possible about the different sites on our route of significance to learn and to remember. But as we drive through the country I will add that Poland is not a bleak land. The landscape is a mix of dense forests and the fields are a green and pleasant land. I’m sure there is much to know about this country that isn’t connected to the Holocaust and maybe one day I’ll come back to find that out too. The Polish people I have met are friendly welcoming people and modern Poland isn’t reflected in what I’m doing here.
But returning to our trip, we started the day at a death pit. It sounds harsh and my reaction was probably similar to yours as you read that. A what? But how? And why?
I’m not going to post photos of the pits. But the forest was peaceful, tranquil, and could have been a relaxing place where you can escape the daily grind.
So “why” is easy and we’ve heard it before. The Nazis wanted to eradicate the world of Jews or communists, liberals, opposition of any form.
The “how” is harder to comprehend.
In this spot, in this forest, 10,000 people were killed by gunshot. Lined up and shot by machine gun at the end of a ditch so they fell forward and buried themselves. Some were Poles who held positions of influence in the local vicinity. Some were Jews as part of this repetitive story of annihilation of a race. One pit was specifically designated for children and babies - and where we understand up to 800 small bodies now lie. None of this description is easy to comprehend. And today, having been surrounded by almost 10,000 people at the March of the Living yesterday, I can visualise the number. I can imagine how many people that is.
And that is what we saw. And that is what happened. In many many places throughout Europe, only 80+ years ago. Firstly outside Germany as Germany was too good to have that atrocity occur on its land. But as the war progressed, it happened there too.
It's hard to comprehend what we've just seen but this was the story of the Holocaust. Our trip started in Krackow and focused on Auschwitz as the most famous concentration and death camp, but this history is not just about one camp. What we now see is how Auschwitz represented the institutionalisation of the annihilation of a race. In other places, including these forests of Zbylitowska Gora.
And then we continued our journey across Poland and made our way to Lublin, a town south east of Warsaw and in todays reference, the largest Polish town to the Ukrainian border.
And in the south east of the city is the Majdanek concentration camp. This is a vast camp on the outskirts of a larger Polish city. But not too far from where people lived and could see what was going on. It was a labour camp, a prisoner of war camp, it detained Poles and Slavs from the area and ultimately housed Jews from Lublin and the surrounding area up to Warsaw. The buildings included the barracks that we saw elsewhere and in these barracks we saw evidence of the process to strip Jews human traits once more. Of course after a long journey the travellers would have welcomed the chance to clean up - hence the sign towards a bath and disinfectant. But this process was inhumane. Strip the people naked. Shave the bodies completely. Scrub the bodies with disinfectant, shower, and then more often than not, murder them in a gas chamber - which we saw.
The biggest contrast we saw from our previous experience was the primitive and rudimentary manner in which this camp was established. There was much the same process of separation, dehumanisation and extermination across the camp. But it was badly organised and designed. The gas chamber was at one end. The crematoria at the top of a hill. And even in the crematoria we heard how it was designed with no thought to how the smoke would leave the furnaces or the impact of human fat blocking the pipes on a regular basis. So overall this wasn't an efficient systematic machine. But it was effective. And when that process wasn't quick enough, they gathered the Jews of the nearby villages and shot them into another series of death pits. 40,000 shot in 24 hours.
The impression we were all left with was the utter cruelty and sadistic nature of the commandant of the camp. There was no significant work to do here so it was a brutal regime of work to keep them busy - moving stones backwards and forwards just because. It is impossible to decide which of these places that I have visited were the worst. There is no prize at the end. There is just the immense unimaginable horror at every stop of the suffering and humiliation that victims were required to endure.
Our other confusion and observation was the proximity to the city. The camp existed across a main road surrounded by houses and blocks of flats. Irrespective of who lived here in the 1940s, people live there now. Much of that relates to the Poles that see this camp as a memorial to them - not just to the Jews who were murdered here.
After so many days it is now becoming too difficult to describe. Many of the same emotions from Monday are back again. We recited the memorial prayer for those people who were murdered here. More connections to people in our group.
Tonight is our final night here. Tomorrow is the final day. Tomorrow night I get to hug my family. I may have left here but after what I've seen this week, I'll take this with me and keep the stories alive as much as I can.