Majdanek

Fulbright had its mid-year meeting in Lublin this weekend, and during that visit we went to see the concentration camp at Majdanek. This was the first concentration camp I had ever visited, and I am still trying to make sense of the experience.

Majdanek was established by the Germans in 1941 and operated until the camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1944. Because it was captured suddenly, the Germans were not able to completely destroy the camp and so Majdanek is perhaps the best-preserved concentration camp of all of them, though it is overshadowed by ones that killed more people such as Auschwitz and Treblinka, as well as ones that were overrun by the Western allies such as Belsen and Dachau. The number of people who lost their lives there is unclear, but the accepted figure is around 80,000, including 18,000 killed in a single day.

We were given a choice as to whether we wanted to visit the camp or not, and I opted to go mostly out of a sense of obligation. A concentration camp is one of the worst places on the face of the earth. I don't think anybody really wants to go to one. I want to remember my time in Poland as being as pleasant as possible. That sense of obligation, at least for me, came from a sense that avoiding the camps entirely while spending a year here was too close to trying to pretend that the Holocaust never happened.

We visited the camp when it was under about 5 cm (or about 1.5 inches) of accumulated snow, with a temperature hovering around -10 C (+14 F). It was cold and unpleasant, and I was well-dressed against the cold. Abstracting that to living as an inmate with poor clothing and no food was an awful prospect.

The thing that sank in most for me was a feeling of unreality about the whole thing. I can't describe it exactly, but I felt a kind of detachment. It was as if my visit wasn't actually happening while it was actually happening, almost as if it were a dream or a movie that I was watching. We saw a short film about the camp before our visit, and what was perhaps most perturbing was that the SS guards who carried out these horrible crimes had ID photos in which they looked more or less like normal people. Some of them probably had wives and families who asked them how their day was at the office. There was probably a "guard of the month" too. The fact that people led normal lives while murdering people in carload lots, and bringing about the same sights that we were seeing in a film that was impossible to not be sickened by is a disturbing realization.

I understand that everybody has a different reaction to visiting a concentration camp, and mine felt odd in that I thought I would feel more emotional than I did while I was there. While I did shudder at times, there was that detachment. It wasn't until after the visit was over that I started to really feel it and I'm having a hard time writing some of this now. I keep flashing back to it, like when I shower in the morning or when I'm in a confined space. I keep trying to make sense of it, thought evil on that scale never can make sense.

There were some impressions that stayed with me from the camp. Majdanek is one of the few camps where the gas chambers were captured intact and are not reconstructions. Zyklon B left a distinct blue-green stain on the walls of the gas chamber where it was used, the other one being a carbon monoxide chamber. I remember just staring at that stain, unable to move as if transfixed by something. That same feeling came when looking into one of the barracks. I stood at the edge of the door, close enough that I could smell what was a cross between rotting potatoes, mildew, and something else I can't put my finger on. The door was open, but I simply could not cross that threshold. I felt a sixth sense that I didn't want to go in there. I also couldn't tear myself away. I heard that some of the barracks at Majdanek are actually reconstructions, but some of them are original, and I would be willing to bet that this was original.

Majdanek was a major center for the processing of stolen property, and the camp's specialty was the repair of shoes. When the Russians took the camp, they found 56,000 or so pairs of shoes, which are now preserved in several giant bins about 8 feet high by about 30 yards long. These shoes are of all kinds and in varying states of repair: oxfords, boots, slippers, and in varying states of repair. They are various sizes too, from babies booties to full-grown men. Each shoe once had a person in them. 

The guard towers all had lightning rods on them. Because after all, we wouldn't want people to get hurt by lightning now would we? A camp designed to kill people has its safety features for those doing the killing.

What contributed to the unreality of the entire scene was the fact that the camp had initially been constructed as a prisoner of war facility. It looked a lot like the set of Hogan's Heroes. I don't think I'll ever be able to watch that show the same way again.

From the camp it is possible to see Lublin quite well, and there are people living just outside the fence of the camp itself. There are people for whom this is the first thing they see when they wake up. Majdanek has its own bus stop, and there's a bus line than runs out to it. No, this isn't a special bus for those just going to the camp, but rather a normal, city bus on a normal city line. 

There have been mass murders throughout human history. Religious persecutions, racial persecutions, political persecutions, this is part of our collective history. So why does the Holocaust stand out? I think part of the reason is that it was an extremely well-planned and executed slaughter, carried out with scientific exactitude and meticulous precision. It was not enough to just kill people: the Nazis meticulously took and cataloged their belongings, and re-used body parts such as hair and ashes. At Majdanek the crematorium was used to heat water and ashes were used to fertilize the SS garden the prisoners were working in. Nothing went to waste. There were also so many extra touches of cruelty and generally macabre behavior. The "you must be this tall to enter" line that Josef Mengele drew at Auschwitz comes to mind, whereby children shorter than a line drawn on a wall were immediately sent to the gas chambers. At Majdanek, the prisoners who were selected to be gassed were made to wait around in the open air, sometimes for hours, before being chivvied into the gas chambers. Bread given to prisoners contained sawdust. The random cruelty was bad enough, but what's worse is that it was all so calculated, and so much thought went into making life as short and as unpleasant as possible.

The last part of the tour was the mausoleum. When the Germans abandoned the camp they tried to destroy as much of it as they could, but they could not get rid of a lot of ashes. So they simply left them in a large pile next to the crematorium. Before the wind could scatter the ashes, the locals collected other ashes lying around the camp and placed them in a large heap. That heap is now covered by a mausoleum that prevents them from being scattered. I walked to the far end of the mausoleum and heard a nearby church bell tolling the start of mass. All else was perfectly quiet. In this pile of ash there were poets, philosophers, scientists, and people who had promising futures. All of them had dreams, fears, aspirations, thoughts, likes, dislikes. In life they may never have met, but in death they lie together. As the bell stopped, all that was left was a penetrating quiet and an entire loss for words or thoughts. There is nothing to say or think when confronted with a large black pile that is all that remains of those thousands of people and thousands of stories.

I realize that this post is more roughly written than some of the others I have written, but I can't bring myself to edit it. I also realize that no matter how much I try or how well I write, it's still going to feel flat to me and cannot match what I feel after having been there.