Last night’s concert was really fun – an opportunity to dress up a bit and experience some European culture. I originally thought the concert would be held in a large church, but instead it was held in the last Polish King’s summer palace! I also thought it would be a large affair with hundreds of people, but instead the 30 of us were in a room just for us. It was great.
Our tour guide took us to the grounds of the Summer Palace and we had an opportunity to walk around and look at some things. The palace (dang it – I didn’t take my camera!) looks like it’s straight from Versailles, France. It was beautiful – inside and out. I kept looking for a grandstand or something where the concert would take place and was surprised when our tour guide took us inside the palace and upstairs to a small (by palace standards) room with a Steinway grand piano at the frfor the ont.
We were all seated on plush chairs that looked like they were made in 1750 and in a few minutes our performer came into the room. He is an accomplished pianist who had taught for 15 years at the Chopin (a Polish composer) Academy of Music. I had a good view of his hands and it was fascinating to watch how they flew over the keys.
After a few pieces of music, we took a short intermission where we were all offered champagne. Not being a drinker, I declined and we all filed into other upstairs rooms in the palace. The furniture was finely crafted an all of the paintings on the wall were real oil on canvas paintings – no prints here!
After the remainder of the concert was finished, we all went back to the bus and then the hotel. Our dinner at the hotel came next and for the first time I felt like I was dressed properly (white shirt and tie) for the occasion – It is a very nice hotel.
This morning we all checked one of our bags (we’ll be back in 4 days) and climbed aboard the bus for a 2 ½ hour drive to Lublin and the Concentration Camp Majdanek. It’s time for a little rest before this new experience.
I’m back with a little break before dinner, so I’ll write a bit about our visit to Majdanek. We came into the camp from the main entrance – where the prisoners were trucked to the camp in 1942 through 1944. The prisoners were brought into Lublin on the train and then trucked to the camp.
The main gate - to the right
This camp was originally created as a prisoner of war camp for Soviet prisoners and then expanded into a concentration camp. Then Jews began to be sent there so gas chambers were built and a crematorium. Eventually a larger crematorium was built on the outskirts of the camp. Plans were made to enlarge the camp, but the German gains in the Soviet Union were reversed and they began retreating, so the expansion plans were never realized.
This camp is the best preserved of all the camps. The Nazi’s didn’t build camps to last. They were temporary structures designed to do their awful work and then be dismantled. As the German army was retreating and the Soviets advancing, plans were made to destroy the camp. However, the Soviets were pushing so quickly into Poland that the Germans didn’t have time and the camp was captured nearly intact. The gas chambers and crematorium are still standing and all of the barracks were there as well. Only one “field” of barracks (out of 5) are standing today but you can certainly get the “feel of the place” by going into those.
The first structure we entered was the “Bath/Delousing” building. This is where the prisoners were stripped of their clothing, dunked in delousing baths and then showered. One of the myths of the Holocaust is that gas came out of the showerheads. This did not happen. Zyklon B was used in pellet form and it wouldn’t work that way. If you went into a room with showerheads in the ceiling – you were getting a real shower.
"Bath and Disinfection" Building - for Men. There were 3 gas chambers inside as well.
Shower room showerheads - remember, these only brough water to the prisoners - no gas!!!!!
Those prisoners who had been “selected” to die, however, never went into the real shower room. They were moved from the undressing room through another door in the building to the gas chambers. It was there that they were gassed to death. (I won't share pictures of this one. I'm trying to be as sensitive as I can.)
We were able to move through these rooms and peer into the gas chamber. I can’t describe to you how eerie it felt to look in this room and see the blue-stained walls (zyklon B reacts with the cement walls and stains them blue in patches). I cannot imagine the terror of being packed in so closely in this room.
I went outside after a short time and looked at the doors on the other end of the room – those doors for removing the bodies of the victims. Such ordinary steel doors. They could be to anything – a storage room, a cold-storage locker, anything. . . . .but they’re not. They have become symbols of a most barbarous age - an age when a people were sold a belief that it was OK to kill an entire group of people.
I was told the story of a prisoner in the camp who had medical expertise. He was given the task of essentially autopsying the dead looking for valuables (since when are human beings more valuable after they are dead than before???????). He went to report and saw no bodies to autopsy. He asked his SS supervisor, “Where are the bodies?” He was told, “They are still walking all around here.” In other words these people were already dead to this SS officer. It was just a matter of time and a little work for the process to be completed.
We continued through the camp and went into the storehouses. This particular camp was used as a collection point for all the valuables collected from Jews and other prisoners in 3 different camps. From Majdanek the valuables, clothes, shoes, and other things in good condition were shipped back to Germany.
The first storehouse we entered had a large display of shoes. When the Soviets liberated this camp they found 430,000 pair of shoes (that is not a type-o, I carefully typed in that number – almost half a million pair of shoes!). I saw only a small fraction of those shoes and it is still mind-boggling. I immediately remembered Edward R. Murrow’s (a radio reporter who had to describe what he was seeing to the folks back at home in the US) quote from when he visited a camp at the end of the war:
“One shoe, two shoes, a dozen shoes, yes. But how can you describe several thousand shoes?”
As I walked around the room of shoes I tried to visualize who might wear such a shoe. It was all too easy to envision the owners of these shoes.
Just a few of the shoes found at the camp
We moved on to the living barracks. We saw the barracks sitting in a large field of tall grass. Maintenance workers were busy mowing the grass and tarring the roofs of a couple of the barrack buildings. Then we were told we needed to visualize it without any grass at all. Why no grass? Did were the prisoners so tightly packed in the area that they had trampled all the grass to oblivion like a large trail through the forest? No – it was explained to us that if any grass lived in the camp area it would have been eaten by the inmates. There would have been no grass in the camp – no grass at all.
I don’t know why this fact affected me so much, but it did. I can still remember walking through the rest of the barracks area repeating, “They ate all the grass” over and over in my head as if trying to convince myself that it is true.
Our final stop at the camp was a large dome covering ashes left from the largest single day of murder during the Holocaust. 18,400 people were moved into ditches in shifts (music blaring from loudspeakers to muffle the sounds of rifle-fire lest the prisoners revolt) and shot. 18,400 people in one day. The Germans tried to burn the bodies in the crematorium, but soon realized it wasn’t going to work. So, they burned them in place in the ditches. After the war, the pits were opened and those ashes were placed in this memorial dome area that had been prepared.
As I looked at the ashes two things impressed themselves on me. First, the sheer size of the mound of ashes. I compare the number of people who can fit in the BYU-Idaho auditorium – 3 thousand more than can fit in that auditorium – all in one day. . . . . Second, as I looked at the ashes, I noticed more than ashes. I saw bone fragments. I cannot describe the feeling that shot through me when I recognized these fragments. Shoes are one thing – bone fragments are another. It became all too real at that point.
We read a few poems and lit some candles in memory of the murdered and from there we walked to the “new” crematorium which was not destroyed by the Germans as they retreated. I looked around, but honestly, I was so numb from the previous half hour’s experiences that I’ve recorded what I saw (in my mind) and will work on processing it later. I simply made it to “overload” and had to shut down for a while.
These experiences remind me of something I heard a few days ago. President Franklin Roosevelt and Felix Frankfurter (Supreme Court Justice and a Jew who emigrated from Europe as a boy with his family in 1894) met with someone who had escaped from Auschwitz in 1943. The former prisoner described what he had seen, what he knew to be true. Justice Frankfurter told the man, “I don’t believe it.” The former prisoner became agitated – he had told what he knew to be true – what he had seen with his own eyes. How could it be disputed? Justice Frankfurter explained further, “I do not deny what you say, but I don’t believe it either.”
That’s exactly how I felt today. I am seeing all this proof, all this evidence of the atrocities and I still have trouble processing the truth. How could this be? I believe it in my head, but my heart is reluctant to accept the realization that ordinary men could do this to other ordinary men. They weren’t psychotic, they weren’t brain-damaged, they didn’t have significant mental illness. They were ordinary men who believed in an ideology that elevated them above their fellow-men.
I was also reminded that no one has ever uncovered any specific order from Adolf Hitler instigating the mass murder of the Jews. He sure talked about getting rid of them, annihilation, etc., but no specific order to get the machinery running has ever been found. What if there never was any specific order? That means that ordinary men took what he was saying and put it into practice. They understood what he wanted and they took those steps to please Hitler. One historian called it, “Working toward the Fuhrer.”
And, to take that idea to the next step, I quote from Primo Levi (an Italian Jew Survivor), “It happened, therefore it can happen again.”
We (I talked with others in the group later) really needed some time to decompress and to process what we had just seen and learned, but we were sent to the bus and off we went back to Lublin.
After a leisurely lunch we went on a walking tour of Lublin. It was very interesting, but my mind was still on Mjdanek, so I paid little attention.
Our final activity of the day was to have a group meeting. Elaine took charge in this meeting and told us stories of her family – particularly of her father (remember, Elaine is one of our tour leaders and the child of two Holocaust survivors). My heart broke as she related these stories. Here they are as best as I can remember them:
Elaine’s father and his older brother (18 and 20) were “on the run” hiding from the Germans and were living in a “bunker” (hole in the ground) that they had dug. Her father had even fashioned a water pipe that came into the bunker to provide water so they didn’t have to leave as often. They only left at night to scavenge for food or trade for it from sympathetic farmers living in the area.
One night her father was out at night – using no light lest he give himself away – when he stepped on something. He couldn’t see well enough to figure out what it was so he carefully struck a match and looked. He had stepped on the body of a woman. She was dead, but there was an infant trying to nurse at her breast.
Her father was now faced with one of those “choiceless choices.” He wanted to take the child back to the bunker and care for it, but he knew that he couldn’t. The baby would cry and give them away, etc. So, he left the child there and walked away.
The next experience happened to her father and his older brother once they were in Mauthausen concentration camp. They came to the camp after working as shoe repairmen (their family did that before the war) and so they had built small secret compartments in their belts.
Upon entering the camp, they were stripped, but allowed to keep their belts and shoes which were checked carefully by the guards. They were given new uniforms and sent to roll call.
One day at roll call her father noticed something in the ground. He bent down and pulled up a harmonica that someone had hidden in the gravel of the yard. He tried to quietly play it but it wouldn’t make a sound. He looked up into it and noticed something inside so he dropped it on the ground and smashed it with his boot. Inside there were hidden 3 diamonds. Those diamonds would save her father’s life.
The brothers split the diamonds, the older brother keeping 2 and Elaine’s father keeping the last one. They hid them away in their secret compartments in their belts.
Later, the brothers were separated and Elaine’s father was sent to the rock quarry which meant certain death. They were made to haul large stones quarried nearby up a large flight of steps carved into the cliff. Men would collapse and fall and die, or they might be pushed by SS guards. Either way, you were not going to make it.
Elaine’s uncle learned that his younger brother had been sent to this detail and he decided to try and bribe a Kapo to get him removed from that duty. He didn’t know if it would work. The bribe could cost him his life, cost his younger brother his life, or both. Fortunately, the Kapo took the bribe and Elaine’s father was removed from the detail.
The final story happened years later, after both brothers had immigrated to the United States and after Elaine was born and had a family of her own. The two brothers wanted a marker to remember their family that had been murdered in the Holocaust so they could go to a specific place to remember them. They ordered the plaque and organized a day of celebration for both their families to come and see the plaque.
When the day arrived Elaine saw the plaque before her father and noticed an unfortunate mistake. She had been told that the two brothers had three younger siblings that were murdered – two sisters and a baby brother. The plaque had their names, but also had a fourth name, Sarah.
She ran to her father to tell him - she just knew he would be so upset. He then told her that there had actually been another child. The very day the Germans came into their town to round up the Jews, his mother was in the hospital giving birth to a child. They learned that the child was a girl, but nothing else. The child was most likely killed at the hospital. Their mother was then deported to Belzec and murdered there – the family never saw her again.
The two brothers (after the war) consulted with a Rabbi who told them that they should call the girl “Sarah” as she had never been given a name. That was the Sarah who was on the plaque.
When Elaine asked her father why she had never been told about this additional child he said, “I didn’t know how much to tell my children. I was afraid that if I told them too much they would stop being children.”
I have no commentary on those stories only to say that I was devastated when I heard them. But, I’m glad she shared them with us as now I can share those stories and keep alive the memory of her family that was murdered not so long ago.
It has been a really tough day. I’m exhausted but not sleepy. I need to process a lot of thoughts and emotions. Fortunately we have a long bus ride to Belzec camp tomorrow and an even longer ride to Krakow after we’ve finished touring that memorial. Much to process. . . . .
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