LUBLIN, Poland — A group of about 20 survivors and 2Gs (Second Generation) took a trip out of Warsaw and into the countryside. It was 8 a.m., and Agneishka S. was our guide. We didn’t know what to expect and so we girded our loins for what we knew was going to be a rough go. First stop, Majdanek—a death camp pressed up against the edge of the city of Lublin, which for centuries until the Holocaust, was an incredible center of Jewish life and learning.
Majdanek was opened on October 1, 1941 as a P.O.W. camp, became a death camp and was captured intact by the Red Army on July 22, 1944.
During the 34 months of its operation more than 79,000 people were murdered there—59,000 of them Jews from Lublin and Warsaw—and the locals knew it. It was the only camp located near a major city and the Nazis had no time to destroy it before they ran from the Soviets.
I sat in the back seat of the bus, behind Isaac and Karen. Charley was upfront with other folks from his hometown, Detroit. He and I had gone to Bergen-Belsen in 1985 together to protest when U. S. President Ronald Reagan went to Bitburg to lay a wreath on the graves of the Waffen S.S.
When we pulled out of Warsaw, only a few of us knew each other, and I huddled near the window, feeling alone. Camera in hand, I was waiting to see what I could see from the window of this time capsule, a rocket shaped bullet of a bus that sped through the countryside. You could glimpse a bit of antisemitic graffiti scrawled on the walls, but not as much as expected. (I saw more in London in 2000 than I saw on the way to Lublin in 2011.)
Once we left Warsaw city limits, it was as if there were no suburbs. We went from city to country in a heartbeat. Little hamlets lined the two-lane road, until we came to little towns, where the road signs at the major intersections pointed to Reszow, Chelm, Bialystok, Wroclaw (Breslov to the Hasidim of Reb NaNaNa Nachman) and back to Warsaw.
Between the tiny dorfs with their neat little gardens, were the forests, but the bus was moving too fast, and the windows were too reflective to get good shots of the places where the ghosts of the partisans seemed to hide behind each narrow-trunked tree. The dense greenery I had seen from the plane separated fields and we wondered how so many managed to hide in these small places, worrying about the mushroom gatherers and others who wandered through the woods. Once in a while, a dirt road would disappear into the trees, which were densely packed between fields.
We arrived in Lublin, a crowded city, and Agnieshka pointed out the castle on the hill. It was the same castle where Eta Wrobel, one of my favorite and feisty survivors, was held by the Nazis and then escaped into the woods. (Eta was a partisan from Lukow, who’d been betrayed for forging work permits and other papers.)
Before we could even absorb the city or the castle, we pulled into a parking lot in front of a low-slung building that smelled like a urinal, and they made us watch a movie we didn’t want to see. Beyond the building were the watch towers and the barbed wire fences, as well as a chimney in the far distance. A gray stone wall said Majdanek, and to the right of that wall was a huge monument, a massive, massive block of concrete or stone mounted on pillars that dwarfed everything around it. And when you stood in front of it, off in the distance, about half a mile away, was something that closely resembled a flying saucer.
It looked like we were the only busload of “tourists” in the place. A handful of people, speaking Polish, passed us by. I wandered off by myself. I didn’t like group pictures, and having listened to so many stories, seen so many photos (all in black and white of course), I didn’t think I really needed explanations of how a death camp worked.
I wandered into the disinfection showers, and pulled out a little prayer book I had “neglected” to give back to Isaac, who carried a few copies. I thought this would be as good a place as I could find for the moment, empty but for me, so I could whisper a few psalms for the health of my cousin, Libbie, in Jerusalem. Her dad had asked me to say prayers over the graves of our “great” ancestors—the “Gedolim,” the generations of religious leaders of the Jewish people for centuries before the Holocaust. As far as I was concerned, all those who were murdered in this terrifying place were Gedolim.
Soon Charley (from Detroit), Isaac (from Boston), Karen (from Pine, Colorado) and the others walked in with the guide. We were led from the showers to two gas chambers—one run on diesel fuel and the other on Xyklon B. These were no underground gas chambers. They were right there, near the entrance to the camp. Welcome to Majdanek, welcome to the death factory, we have nothing to hide.
Tears ran free as we recited El Moleh Rachamim and Kaddish. It wouldn’t be the last time, not in that place or in others.
We moved on to the barracks—did I need to know the numbers? These barracks were not shades of gray, they were in trendy “earth tones,” which gave me a dose of cognitive dissonance. (That was going to happen a lot to all of us on this trip.) How many bodies were squeezed into each bunk? What rained down on you from the pallet above if its inhabitant did not live through the night? The stench would have been unimaginable, and the stove, the only source of heat, looked incredibly inefficient, so that people would freeze in the winters. The ventilation was minimal, so that people would suffocate in the summers. (The day we were there, the temperature was hovering in the 90s. and the sun was brutal.)
The gray gravel crunched underfoot and when we looked back, the massive monument looked smaller and less overbearing.
But we were nearing the crematorium, and the town of Lublin looked down at the camp with its implacable façade. I looked at Charley. He looked at me. “Do you watch HGTV?” I asked. “House Hunters International,” he said. “Rooms with a view,” I said. “Do they get a discount? Move to Lublin and get a view of rolling green fields? Beats me.”
The crematorium was ingenious. It was in perfect condition, as if you could go back to business on demand. The ovens were spotlessly clean, not an ash to be seen. The energy generated by them was used to heat water for the camp and officers’ quarters. Some asked what they used for fuel. “Coke,” said the guide.
“The real thing,” I murmured to myself, bitterly. Charley heard me and gave me a poke. “Let’s say Kaddish,” I responded. And we did.
As we were leaving, Charley and I looked out the back door of this place that was hell, at the blooming flower beds, in the bright sunshine, as the city’s windows stared back at us blankly, with the castle on the hill behind them.
So tastefully done.
I walked over to the “flying saucer” and looked down at tons of ashes and bits of bones. All that was left of those who passed through the gates of this place in my face was this pile of human remains, whose souls we could feel floating around us.
We said Kaddish once again, I prayed for Libbie, and we left for the city to look for some hope.
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Friedman is Greater New York bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. She may be contacted at jeanette.friedman@sdjewishworld.com