Majdanek

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This morning we left for Lublin and I couldn’t have been more excited to leave Warsaw; it was a very ugly town. It was a fun three hour bus ride where we watched a movie on the history of Poland and then went straight to Majdanek.

Majdanek was the first death camp that we have been to that still has a majority of the camp still intact. One of the most disturbing things to me was that the town is literally up next to the edge of the camp and that on the other side of the camp there is a large cemetery. To me, that is really disrespectful to the memory of the victims of the holocaust, and is just something that I cannot even imagine doing as a person who knows about everything that took place there. I would feel uncomfortable living next to a place of torture and death and would hate to have my children grow up with their backyard being a death camp. It was a strange experience to walk around the camp because in the distance you could hear dogs barking and children altering between laughing, and screaming and crying. It was hard to determine whether they were actually there, or if they were my mind playing tricks on me. They were definitely sounds that made the camp feeling even more realistic. I felt trapped walking around the camp enclosed in the barbed wire fences and felt like I was being watched form the guard towers even though I knew that there was no one in there. The first barrack that we went into was the men’s barrack where they were given showers and then shaved while their clothes were disinfected. Then they proceeded to enter the gas chambers. It was a very hard start to visiting the camp; I did not enjoy seeing where thousands of people were murdered. We then went to a barrack that made me cry. It was filled with four columns that took up the entire length of the building and was filled with over 430,000 pairs of shoes. I think it was so hard because that was the first time this trip that I was face to face with personal, everyday items that belonged to the victims and they were items that were very similar to items that I have in my own closet. They were also hard to look at because they ranged from young children to adults and each shoe had a distinct personality to it. I could imagine each victim going to the shoe store and trying on shoes until they found a shoe that they loved, just like I do. And now, they are just two shoes among the rest in an abandoned building as a symbol of a faceless person that suffered on the very grounds that they are on. Walking around the other barracks and the grounds of the camp were hard because all I felt was sadness for everyone that had been there and suffered; I felt bad that almost everyone there had had to suffer through everything all for nothing. Very few were able to survive. I did enjoy that, at the end of the section of barracks we were in, there was a column with three eagles about to take of in flight on top of it that represented hope for the people in the camp. It was comforting that even though they were going through such horrible things that they still had the slightest hope that things would get better and that there was one positive thing out of all the negative that was there. I was glad that we were running out of time at this point because by the time that we got to the crematorium, we only had a few minutes to run in and out and we only looked at the mausoleum that was next to it. Two of the boys ran up to the top and they said that it was full of ash up to the top and that some of the bones were still visible. That is something that I am glad that I did not see on this trip. I was ready to leave when we did.

Out hotel was really nice and the room was a lot larger than all of the others have been. We attempted to have a group dinner but none of the restaurants had the capacity for all of us so we split up into small groups. I had lunch with Jeff, Brian, and Kelsey R. We had a good time and then wandered around the town.

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