Majdanek concentration camp

The first thing many visitors notice here is the wind. It moves across a wide field of short grass, and almost nothing stands in its way. Gravel crunches under your shoes. Ahead, rows of low wooden barracks stand behind a double fence of barbed wire, and watchtowers rise at the corners. Then you turn your head, and you see apartment blocks, church towers, and the traffic of a modern city. That view is the first lesson of this place. Majdanek was never hidden away.

This is the site of a German Nazi concentration camp, built on the edge of Lublin during the occupation of Poland. Its official name was Konzentrationslager Lublin, which simply means Concentration Camp Lublin. Local people called it Majdanek, after Majdan Tatarski, a nearby district of the city. Construction began in the autumn of 1941, on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, the Nazi party's security and police force. The original plans were enormous. Only part of them was ever built, but even that part covers the ground you see around you.

At first, the camp was intended for Soviet prisoners of war. Many of them died during the first winter, in the cold and mud, from hunger and disease. Soon the camp took in many other people. There were Polish political prisoners, farmers from the surrounding villages, and people arrested in street round-ups. There were prisoners from across occupied Europe. And above all, there were Jews, deported from Lublin, from across Poland, and from other countries. Jews made up the largest group of the people who died here.

Majdanek was both a concentration camp and a place of mass murder. Prisoners were forced into hard labour, and many were worked to death. Others died from starvation, beatings, typhus, and executions. The camp also had gas chambers. Historians at the State Museum at Majdanek estimate that around 78,000 people were killed here. Most of them were Jews. These figures come from careful research in surviving records, and they are lower than the estimates once made just after the war. The museum continues to study the camp's history.

As you walk on, you come to the gas chamber building, close to the area where new arrivals were taken. Step inside quietly. On the concrete walls of one chamber, you can see dark blue stains. They are traces left by Zyklon B, a poison gas made from hydrogen cyanide. The stains have stayed in the walls for more than eighty years. Many visitors walk past them without understanding what they are. Once you know, it is very difficult to look away.

One date stands above all others in the camp's history. On the 3rd of November 1943, the SS carried out a mass shooting that the Germans called Operation Harvest Festival. In a single day, around 18,000 Jewish prisoners were shot at Majdanek, in trenches dug near the crematorium. Similar killings took place at other camps in the Lublin district during the same days. Loud music was played through loudspeakers during the shootings. It was meant to cover the sound of the guns. It was one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust.

The barracks you see today are wooden, low, and long. Some of them now hold exhibitions. In one, there are wire cages filled with shoes. There are thousands upon thousands of them... worn work boots, women's shoes, small children's shoes. Many came from victims of the death camps in this region, because Lublin was a centre for sorting the property taken from murdered Jews. The leather has turned dark and stiff. The smell of old leather fills the room. Each pair belonged to one person.

In July 1944, the Soviet Red Army reached Lublin. The Germans left in a hurry. They set fire to the crematorium and some other buildings, but they did not have time to destroy the whole camp. Majdanek became the first major Nazi camp to be liberated with much of its structure still standing. Journalists came and photographed the barracks, the gas chambers, and the ovens. Those images were among the first proof the outside world saw of what was happening in the camps.

In the autumn of 1944, while the war was still going on further west, a museum was founded on this site. It was one of the earliest memorials anywhere at a former Nazi camp. That means people have come here to remember for almost as long as the war itself lasted. Former prisoners, families of victims, school groups, and visitors from all over the world have walked this same road. The museum also keeps archives, collects testimonies, and continues research about the people who were held here.

At the entrance to the grounds stands a large stone monument. It is called the Monument of Struggle and Martyrdom, designed by the sculptor Wiktor Tołkin and unveiled in 1969. Its heavy, broken shape hangs above the ground like a block about to fall. From there, a long path leads across the field. This is sometimes called the Road of Homage. It runs past the barracks and the fences, all the way to the far end of the camp.

At the end of that road is the Mausoleum. It is a wide dome on columns, open at the sides. Under the dome lies a large mound of human ashes, gathered from the camp after liberation. People often stop here and stand in silence. Some leave flowers, candles, or small stones. Leaving a small stone is a Jewish tradition of remembrance at a grave. Here it is a way to say that someone came, and someone remembered.

Walk back slowly, and look again at the edge of the camp. Houses stand very close to the fences. During the war, people in Lublin could see the smoke from the crematorium. This closeness raises hard questions about what ordinary people knew, and what they could do. The museum does not give one easy answer. It asks visitors to think about it. That question still matters today, in every city where people look away from the suffering of others.

As you leave, take one more moment in the open air. Listen to the wind over the grass, and the distant sound of cars on the road to the city. Look at the fence posts, the plain wooden walls, the long line of the path behind you. This is a quiet place now, and it was built to be remembered that way. Whatever you carry out of here... a name, a pair of shoes, the colour of a stained wall... let it go with you into the city beyond the fence.