One weekend, several of the students in our program made a trip to Majdanek Concentration Camp outside of Lublin. Majdanek was one of the very worst of the concentration and death camps set up by the Nazis during World War II. It stands on the outskirts of Lublin, which was meant to be one of the administrative centers of the Nazi regime after the war. This camp is strange in that it is near a major city, not in a more secluded part of Poland like Auschwitz. The camp was established in 1941, initially as a prisoner of war camp. Although the camp was intended to hold nearly 250,000 prisoners, a disease outbreak killed off all of the initial forced labor, and as a consequence, the camp remained partially uncompleted throughout they war. Nevertheless, it held
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