Maidanek
Towards the end of 1940, the Germans began constructing the Maidanek concentration camp. By 1943, six separate units had already been complete. Each unit consisted of twenty-four barracks. The camp itself was surrounded by two rows of barbed wire, charged with high-voltage electricity.
The town of Lublin is just 2 kilometers away. Around the camp were
guard towers and it was patrolled at all times by German soldiers and
their attack-trained police dogs. At any given time, the camp held
between 25,000 - 45,000 people. The vast majority of those who entered
Maidanek never left. Starvation and disease was common place. The
ordinary daily ration of a prisoner consisted of one issue per day of
coffee made of roasted turnips, two issues per day of soup made of
grass, and small amounts of bread, often containing sawdust or chestnut
flour.
There were two phases during which time the Germans used the Maidanek
Concentration Camp. During the first period, the Germans buried the
bodies of all those they shot and tortured to death. Later, during
the second phase (in 1943 and 1944), they burned the bodies, exhuming
them from the pits in which the victims had been previously buried.
Already in the beginning of 1942 two furnaces for burning corpses were
built within the camp. Because of the extremely large number
of corpses that had to be dealt with, the Germans, began building a
larger crematorium with five incinerators in 1942. This completed
in the autumn of 1943. From that time, the furnaces were in continuous
operation.
According to one witness: "The furnaces were intended for the purpose
of incinerating corpses and were calculated to work continuously.
Each furnace was
capable of holding four corpses at a time if the extremities were hacked
off. The time taken to incinerate four corpses was fifteen
minutes, which, working night and day, made it possible to incinerate
one thousand nine hundred and twenty corpses in twenty-four hours."
Between February 1942 and July 1944 about half a million Jews were destroyed there by gassing and by shooting. When the Soviet troops liberated the camp on July 24, 1944, they found fewer than six hundred inmates still alive.
Today, there are several horrible reminders of what was done in Maidanek.
- Collection of some 800,000 pairs of shoes (see Story of a Shoe).
- Mount of Ashes
- Crematoria and gas chambers
The memorial to Maidanek and its victims is a touching reminder of what was done to hundreds of thousands of Jews. It is very hard to look out past the fields and see houses and ordinary people going about their ordinary lives within such a short distance of the camp. During the war, it would have been impossible for people in those camps not to have known, not to have smelled, not to have heard or seen what was happening to the Jews of Poland in Maidanek.
Lest we forget, all roads lead back to those defining moments in history when Poland's Jews were taken to Auschwitz and Treblinka and Maidanek and Chelmno and to the ghettoes and mass graves.