Day 8: Majdanek

Today was such a great day after staying in a really nice hotel in Lublin and waking up feeling well rested after a long journey the day before. The goal for today was to visit and learn as much as possible at the Majdanek Concentration Camp. The Majdanek Concentration Camp was constructed in Lublin, Poland in 1941. The camp was a labor and extermination camp. The prisoners were Jews from Poland and Western Europe, non-Jewish Poles, tens of thousands of Soviet Union POWs, and some Roma Gypsies. This Concentration Camp was divided into six compounds; one for women, another field hospital for Russian collaborators, and the rest were for male political prisoners and Jews. Conditions there were extremely poor. In fact, the conditions here were in some ways even worse than Auschwitz. It makes you think about what was going on in all the other camps.
I think that the camp visit was very disturbing. The smell had made a lot of peoples' stomachs turn and they were unable to enter the cabin. It has been 62 years since the camp had been liberated. Just think how bad it smelled 62 years earlier. I believe that because of so many dead bodies, it had given the whole cabin a stench. Besides the smell, I could not help to think about all of the people who lived next door to a concentation camp. Could you believe that these people's backyards was a gas chamber, Nazi watch towers and a crematorium? A lot of us had been wondering the same thing about all of the camps we had visited.
The most horrible thing about our walk through Majdanek was the fact that the Nazis left the ashes of the Jews that were killed there in the gas chambers in a nice, neat pile. The ashes where all put together in a huge pile that was the size of an average house. It makes you think because all of these ashes came form a very small crematorium. This was one of the only camps that used two ways to kill the Jews. They used the popular Zyclon B as well as carbon monoxide. Also it was shocking how the people of Lublin let these killings go on for so long without saying anything, and then claimed that they never knew about it. The entire concentration camp was visible from the town, because it was on a hill, so it was impossible to say that they did not see anything. To show the people what was going on the Russians gathered up all the town people and walked them through the camp. This whole experience just makes you think about how cruel people can be to each other, and how others can sit back and watch this happen in the middle of their town and stay quiet about it.