Inside a Nazi Concentration Camp
Located just outside the Polish city of Lublin, the Majdanek concentration camp camp was the site of the murder of eighty thousand Jews over a period of a few years.
What is it like to visit a Nazi concentration camp? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.
In the summer of 2017, I visited Poland with my youth group on a “Heritage Quest” to learn about Jewish life before the war. While the whole week was incredibly emotional and difficult, the place that had the greatest impact on me was Majdanek Concentration Camp.
The Majdanek concentration camp (pronounced “My-dah-neck”) may not be as well known as Auschwitz, but it is actually the best preserved of all the Nazi camps. Located just outside the Polish city of Lublin, this camp was the site of the murder of eighty thousand Jews over a period of a few years.
The day started like any other. We woke up, had breakfast, and boarded the bus half-asleep. I was just starting to settle in when we turned a corner, and BAM, there it was. A sudden hush fell over the bus. We could see the original barracks and guard towers that I had only seen in history books and documentaries before. It felt surreal just looking at it.
Majdanek concentration camp
For some reason, I had always imagined these types of places to be far out in the middle of nowhere. But no, Majdanek was much closer to home. It was no secret to the locals what was going on there. Although Lublin had obviously expanded a lot within the past eighty years, the camp was still only ten minutes away from the city center. Its hard to believe that such atrocities occurred so close to major cities.
As soon as we got off the bus, a peculiar smell hit the air. It was kind of a coppery, metallic odor. I shrugged it off and forgot it about it. It was a beautiful summer day, sun shining. I was standing in big open field, surrounded by old wood buildings. I had to remind myself where I was. Our tour guide took us to the bathhouses first.
Shower room where victims were forced to undress and shower. The bath in the corner was filled with disinfectant, and victims were forced to soak in it to prevent the spread of infection. This was done to give the victims a false sense of hope before herding many of them into the gas chambers.
At Majdanek, the Nazis preferred to gas prisoners with Zyklon B, a German pesticide made from cyanide. According to our tour guide, prisoners were given hot showers before being gassed, because the Germans believed the hotter the body, the quicker the death. The Nazi captors weren’t concerned about a quick and painless experience but with the efficiency of the process and the conservation of their resources.
Canisters of Zyklon-B gas.
Gas chamber. The blue-green stains on the walls are evidence of the Zyklon-B gas.
I felt like someone had slapped me in the face very hard. No matter how many documentaries I had watched, I was not expecting what I actually saw. Very surreal, to say the least.
As Jews, we are not just emotionally detached tourists who look around from a safe distance and then leave. This place is one of the most tragic parts of our history. It is far more than a museum. We must pay respect to the victims because they are our own.
The most moving part of Majdanek for me had to be a room where they stored bins containing the shoes of the camp’s victims. There is just something so personal about shoes. Our guide told us to pick shoe and imagine the story of its owner. Just one shoe. Had its owner seen them in a store window and saved up money to buy them? Maybe it was for a special occasion, or a gift from someone special.
The thousands of shoes on display represent only a tiny fraction of the shoes unfairly taken from prisoners.
I stared at the shoes for so long that I lost track of time. I focused my attention on one worn-out shoe, once worn by a small child. I tried to imagine that child, a life taken too early for no reason at all, but it was impossible.
Right outside the crematoria is a an area that looks like just a bumpy field. But it is, in fact, a series of “execution pits.” Over eighteen thousand men, women, and children were stacked and buried in these ditches.
Ditches where corpses were buried.
We went on to enter the crematoria building. At this point, it was getting really difficult to continue.
The crematoria building. The skyline of Lublin is visible in the background.
The original “dentist’s table” where the Nazis performed operations such as gold tooth extractions.
Ovens where the gassed corpses where burned.
As we entered the room with the ovens, our group became silent. We all knew exactly what we were looking at. This was it, the stuff of my nightmares that had plagued me since the third grade when I first learned about the Holocaust in school. I felt like I was suffocating in that room, and I started pacing restlessly.
Ovens where the corpses were burned.
To finish off our tour, we went to the mausoleum where they stored the victims’ ashes. As we neared the structure, the coppery smell I noticed when I got off the bus a few hours ago got stronger, and I realized what it was. When human flesh burns, all of the iron-rich blood inside gives off a metallic odor. The enormous mound of human ashes was the source of this smell.
Ashes of the victims of the Majdanek camp. Before the liberation by the Soviet Union in 1944, the Nazis hurriedly burned as many corpses as possible to hide the evidence of their crimes. They left a pile of ashes, and the mausoleum was built around it. If you look closely, you can see bone fragments.
I felt like I should cry, or at least feel sad, but I didn’t. To my immense surprise, I felt nothing at all. For a good 90% of the time I spent in the camp, not a hint of emotion ran through my veins. And I felt absolutely horrible about it. Why wasn’t I sobbing and gasping like a normal person? I was standing in the middle of one of the darkest places in the history of my people, and all I could think about was what was for lunch. Needless to say, I wasn’t happily strolling through the barracks like nothing happened there, but I wasn’t especially sad or paralyzed.
I was in shock for not being in shock.
I expressed my frustration and anger with myself to my group leader, Sarah. She told me that people handle grief in their own ways, and that your mind protects you from the pain. Only as I write this now is everything is really starting to come back to me.
This has been the most difficult yet urgent post I had to write. How do I express the heavy pain in my chest that lingers as I sit in my comfortable house, in my free country that tolerates and respects different religions and peoples? How can I remember and write about this place of pure evil as I shiver in horror? We don’t want to remember, but how could we forget?
This is the kind of trip you make once in a lifetime. It is important, but extremely difficult and depressing. I will never return to Poland or this horrible place ever again.
This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Quora:
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Healine Photo Credit: Getty Images / All Other Photos: Elizabeth Sivkin