I've been back from my trip now for three weeks and procrastinating on finishing up the posts and galleries. In part, I think this was because I deeply needed some down time to reflect. I also knew I wanted my next post to be about Majdanek, and I've been putting that off.
I really am striving for this writing I've been doing to not be overly melodramatic. I don't want to disrespect the places I have been, or the memory of the people who suffered and were murdered.
Majdanek, though. The Majdanek visit is hard to write about without wading into melodrama. Of all the camps I visited, this one was the most viscerally (for me) like you think a place like this should be. This post will be a bit of a mess, I'm afraid. I've chosen to keep editorial comments in place for sections I've wrestled with. My experience of Majdanek is best served by somewhat incoherent text.
Majdanek was the first museum of the camps to form, in 1944, serving the propagandistic goals of the Red Army to underscore their role as liberators and saviours. Much of the camp remained intact, given the speed with which the Germans had to abandon it in retreat, but substantial portions were later removed. Majdanek was made principally of wood and poorly built, and our tour guide shared that wood was a valuable resource at the time.
When we first arrived, the sky was grey-on-grey with occasional flakes of snow.
The first buildings we went into were the bathing areas. In this area, you can see a room where Zyklon B was used for fumigating clothing. The traces of the gas are starkly present on the walls.
I saw the gas chambers, very briefly. No pictures. I'm not sure why I draw a line there, but I do. Those, and the crematorium ovens, seem off limits to me. I'm aware there is a narrative inconsistency in what I seem willing to understand through my camera lens, and what I choose not to.
I did not stay in this space to look, frankly. I wanted gone as quick as possible, and I had the privilege of taking myself away from this place, so I did. I've been trying to think of something to write about the experience of being in so close proximity to a fully intact gas chamber, in particular, and I've settled on my own silence.
Instead, I want to share this poem from an unknown Jewish woman who was killed in a gas chamber at Birkenau, to stand for the beautiful minds we lost and will never know. This is one of two poems, translated by Stephen Jolly, given by this woman to a Sonderkommando on her way to the gas chamber on March 8, 1944 and smuggled out of the camp. It is a miracle we have it, and her writing deserves to be read.
I'd Rather Die
Author unknown
I know: There are great words
For which men can die-
Words that inflame to action;
While calm is coward-shy
When, shielded by their banners,
The crowds in tumult roar.
But he who has known
Old mothers left alone,
And children without fathers,
He believes them no more.
I know: There are great deeds
Which call for sacrifice.
I know: There are heroe's deeds
By which the profit-price
Of fruitless wars is turned
To long intervals of truce.
But he who has seen from far
The crashing cathedral tower,
The broken towns in the fire,
No longer believes them of use.
I know: There are great men
With a claim to eternity.
The years are engraved with their blood;
In superfluity
They rot in cemeteries
In the shade of worthy elms.
But he who has seen the slain
Writhing in final pain
Under the blood-drenched sword,
He knows of better realms.
I know: I am small and pitiful
And maybe cut a mean figure.
I know: These words of mine
Are poison and danger,
And can turn sour
Your raucous bands.
And yet I'd rather die,
Your spittle in my eye,
Rather die as a coward,
Than have blood on my hands.
From “TWO POEMS: Written in Auschwitz By an Unknown Author.” 1965. Jewish Quarterly 13 (2): 33.
After this, we entered Barrack 47, which currently houses an art exhibit. Tadeusz Mysłowski, the artist, explains its purpose:
Click first image to open larger images.
In the exhibit, you hear the music of Zbigniew Bargielski, excerpts of memoirs, and prayers from multiple faiths.
We emerged from this into a clearing blue sky. This is the sky about 45 minutes into our visit, compared to the grey when we arrived, as you saw in the first photo in this post. In the background, you can see the Mausoleum that houses the ashes of murdered people.
We next entered the barrack building that holds 56,000 shoes of victims of Aktion Reinhard and the Majdanek camp. Our tour guide shared that Majdanek received goods plundered from those murdered at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka for sorting, repair, and distribution.
Click first image to open larger images.
This was a profoundly disquieting thing to see. I'm still parsing how I feel about this exhibit. It does convey the overwhelming scale of the people killed, yes, and it is a place of truth. The majority of these people died without names, and these are traces of their lives. I've edited this bit of the post so many times but I keep coming back to the same thing. This jumbled and jarring mass of footwear felt disrespectful to me.
Is there any possible way to tell this story with respect, though? This is one of the spaces we have "things" to display because of how it was found.
Majdanek, August 1944. Photo from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Majdanek isn't bombed out remains, largely retaken by nature or interpreted through memorialization with new structures. So we have shoes. Many thousands of them. They have to be preserved.
I don't know. This should be seen. I saw it, I took a photo so I could write about it later, and I can't let it go, so I suppose the exhibit did the work it was meant to do. And I remain deeply conflicted about that.
As we left, the blue was starting to retreat out of the sky, and storm clouds were coming in again. The wind picked up.
We walked by the preserved remains of a road built by prisoners. You can see the Matzevot fragments clearly. On our walk to the first barracks, we passed by the preserved rollers prisoners used to create roads. Our tour guide informed us the tool was also made from crushed Matzevot. The Nazi desecration of Jewish cemeteries in service of humiliation and raw materials for building was evident everywhere we went in Poland.
Click first image to open larger images.
Nearing the end of our walk up towards the Mausoleum, the wind picked up ferociously and clouds settled in. By the time we stopped at the edge of a barbed wire fence demarcating a hilly field beyond, we were buttressing ourselves against the force of it.
I asked our tour guide if those were the Aktion Erntefest mounds. Our guide was slightly startled, I think both by the use of the German name and that the question clearly preempted a script she usually has to introduce this place. I don't know why I asked. I knew what they were. I knew all about this place.
What you see in this picture is grass growing over mass graves that once held the remains of 18,400 murdered Jewish people. They had been imprisoned at Majdanek, as well as Lipowa 7 and the Lublin Airfield Camp (two forced labour camps in Lublin) and on November 3, 1943 between 6 am and 5 pm, they were shot by Waffen SS soldiers and Police Regiments (including Reserve Police Battalion 101 members). Specially installed speakers blared music during the shootings. Under the coordination and supervision of Erich Muhsfeldt, it took Jewish prisoners two months to burn the bodies that had been buried here when the Nazis pivoted to digging up mass graves to cover up their crimes. All told, 43,000 Jewish people were killed on November 3 and 4, 1943 at Majdanek, Trawniki, and Poniatowa in the single largest Aktion of the Shoah.
I want to write that the wind became violent as we stood in front of the field, but that word seems a blasphemy to use in connection with this place. Still, that is the word I kept typing out in the draft so I am keeping it.
The wind was violent, and the wind was surreal. It came out of nowhere, and it was the kind of wind you feel like you can't easily stand against and which burns your skin.
The air itself felt angry, as if all the constituent parts of the things that make breathing and beauty couldn't figure out how to keep together and were careening about, blindly trying to find a place to be still. I felt strongly that this was a liminal space where the death that visited had leaked out of the past into the present, demanding to be witnessed. Maybe it was seeing the shoes, but I got stuck on the idea that the people couldn’t re-sort themselves into distinct souls. I wanted every one to have a Matzevah, with a name and mourners, instead of this vicious air. I've never felt anything like it.
The next step on our tour would have been to visit the Mausoleum, but the day we went it was undergoing preservation work. I was grateful to not have this be a part of our tour.
We saw the crematorium as well, at the end. I took four photos in this space, all of a bathtub.
Our guide told us that the location of the bathtub has been vexing for researchers. Given its proximity to the crematoria ovens, though, they postulate that Erich Muhsfeldt, a baker before the war and during the war, in charge of crematorium and pyre burning of the murdered, may have taken baths here, since the burning bodies in the ovens would have been a practical way to heat the water.
I was preoccupied with this artefact. Our guide ran us through litany of sadistic and horrifying details throughout the whole tour. Majdanek was by far the most gruesomely specific tour at the camps we visited.
As I edited the picture you see below, I was mulling why I was so fixated on this chosen exhibit - this bathtub, left here, in this space.
In opposition to the burning ovens, just mere feet from where I took this image, the bathtub is something I could set my eyes towards the task of seeing instead of the ovens. If the speculation is true, this is a mise en scène to show how the kind of man who took an active hand in the project of Nazi genocide came into his full depravity. The man who took baths in the heat of burning people was a monster. The men who did this were monsters. It is very easy to be apart from the monsters.
Less so, from the ovens, which, along with the gas chambers, felt insurmountable to me to see for any length of time. I stood in front of the ovens, briefly, knowing the men who did this work were prisoners with no choices. Given the right circumstances, anyone could be that person. It's easier to imagine yourself among the victims but, for me at least, harder to look at what they experienced.
So, I looked at this bathtub instead, and I wondered about the man sat there in his warm water while people were burning and I thought: "What a monster. He must have been a sadist." Sadists, on a whole, seem like a rare thing. This place seems so entirely other as to be an impossibility. This should be an impossible place.
It isn't, though, right? It's a well preserved place, yes, and it serves the role of standing in for countless places of horror that mark our shared history, back to the beginning, and which aren't around anymore. There surely aren't enough sadists to account for the bloody record written on this earth. There are that many people. I read post-war testimony from Muhsfeldt, and he comes across as a man who was proud of the work he did. He was a very good Nazi and had managed to turn misery, death, and pain into just another job to be done. A job to excel at.
This is a place where practicality profited from misery. When a German family wished to have the ashes of a family member returned on their death in this camp, ashes were collected from the general mound and the family was charged a fee. Practical. Practical to ship clothing and goods from the east for sorting and storage, after all German soldiers and civilians needed it and the owners did not, not any more. Practical to use hair shorn from the heads of women to stuff mattresses. Practical to fill a tub with warm water, never mind why the water is warm.
And so we come back to that sticky thing again. People did this. People do this. Still. What do you do with that?
This is the last picture I took, on our walk back. By then, any hint of snow was gone. The wind had died down and the sky was back to blue, about thirty minutes after the Harvest Festival killing pits and the bathtub.
I walked away from the impossibility of this possible place and slept in a cozy farmhouse on the outskirts of Lublin. We ate a delicious meal, and the shower had unbelievably good water pressure that was slightly painful on my wind burned skin. I slept safely in a bed with crisp, freshly washed linens. Thirty days later, I still have dried and cracking skin and deeper cracks in my soul that I don't think will ever reorder themselves to the person I was before I visited this place.
Bit melodramatic, that last sentence, but true nonetheless.
Further reading and citations
Krzysztof Banach. "Exhibiting Violence or Teaching Values? Historical Exhibitions at a Modern Museum of Martyrdom". Link.
Overview of the Shrine to an Unknown Victim exhibit at Majdanek.
“TWO POEMS: Written in Auschwitz By an Unknown Author.” 1965. Jewish Quarterly 13 (2): 33. doi:10.1080/0449010X.1965.10706436.
Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998
Mailander, Elissa. “A Specialist: The Daily Work of Erich Muhsteldt, Chief of the Crematorium at Majdanek Concentration and Extermination Camp, 1942-44.” In Destruction and Human Remains: Disposal and Concealment in Genocide and Mass Violence, edited by Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Élisabeth Anstett. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.