Today we woke up early in order to be on the bus by 8:00 for our ride to Lublin. On the way there, we started learning some songs for memorial services, and watched the movie ‘The Pianist’.
In Lublin, we went to the Godzka Gate NN Theatre. It was a museum dedicated to the Jews of Lublin. There were about 42,000 Jews in Lublin before the war. Today, there are less than 20. The museum showed the thriving Jewish culture before the war, and our guide told us about the interconnectedness of the Jewish and non-Jewish communities. After that, we talked about how Lublin was trying to remember their Jewish community. While they are trying to get as many names, photographs, and stories as they can, they still have a long way to go. Whole families were wiped out, and many people have no one to remember them, we don’t even know their names. The museum also has an exhibit that reads the names of everyone on the last train to the concentration camps on a loop, in order to remember them. The final part of the museum was dedicated to the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’, which is an award given by Yad Vashem to honor gentiles who risked their lives to save Jewish lives. It makes me hopeful to know that no matter the circumstances, people are willing to risk their lives to save others.
We ate lunch in Lublin. We had pizza and salad, and finished everything off with ice cream.
From there, we drove to Majdanek. Unlike Treblinka, Majdanek was not destroyed by the Nazis. This made it so much more emotional. Majdanek was also not built as a death camp; it was a place for people to wait before being taken somewhere else. It was only turned into a death camp later. We looked at where belongings, stolen from Jews who entered the camp, were stored. From there, we saw the barracks and spoke about the living conditions. There were so many bunk beds, and so many more people in each barrack than the bunk beds could hold. Then we walked to the crematorium. The crematorium was another example of how terrifyingly systematic the Nazis were. They had been able to rid themselves of so much empathy that they did not think of killing Jews as wrong, because they did not believe they were people. The Nazis were able to treat Jewish deaths like an equation that needed to be solved.
Right next to the crematorium was a memorial to all those who died on November 3rd, 1943. On that single day, 18,400 Jews were murdered in ditches they had been forced to build. That number sticks out to me because within the Jewish faith, the number 18 is used to symbolize life. In Hebrew, letters have numerical values and the word for life, חי, adds up to 18. But on that day, 18,400 lives were lost. There were so many bodies that the Nazis couldn’t burn them all in the crematorium; they burned the Jews where they fell. Over the next two days approximately 12,000 more Jews were murdered in those ditches. So many bodies burned it began to rain ash. In a nearby monument, ash has been collected and incorporated into a sculpture. It’s hard to comprehend that right in front of you is 30,000 bodies worth of ash. It’s devastating.
We held a memorial service for the victims of Majdanek and took a few minutes to quietly wander around and reflect. Then, we got on the bus to head to Howard’s hometown.
Once we got to the hotel, we found our rooms and had dinner. Then, Howard got a chance to speak. I’m not going to share his entire story with you here because there’s no way I could do it justice in a single blog post, but I will share a few things that stick out to me. The first was Howard asking if his eleven year old brother was a threat to the German empire, so much that he needed to be killed. The other thing that stuck out to me was Howard repeating that survival was all about luck. He said that it was by pure chance he survived, nothing else.
After that, many of us headed straight to our rooms in order to process the day and get some sleep.
Photos by: Zachary Stewart, Dr. Andy, and Tsipy Gur
Emma Stewart is a student at Winchester Thurston School.