Majdanek Camp

  Lublin, Eastern Poland, Poland
Tuesday, August 5, 2008

  We got up early and ate our first breakfast in Poland. This consisted of watery eggs and rolls with butter and jam. The coffee was Nescafe. Have you ever had Nescafe before? Well, there is nothing that you could do to make Nescafe taste good. Throughout the trip I tried it with milk (yuk) and then with sugar (yuk x2) and finally I started drinking it black. I am really not a coffee snob. Just give me a good cup of Maxwell House with milk and I am good to go. After breakfast we left the hotel and drove the short distance to Majdanek Camp. Majdanek was one to the extermination camps built by the Nazi's to exterminate the Jewish people. It is estimated that 79,000 people died there. 
           There is a gas chamber that you can go in. Talk about giving someone the chills. Just standing there thinking about all the people who were killed in there. You can still see the blue residue on the walls and ceiling from the Zyclon B gas.                  You can also go into the crematorium building and see the original ovens that they used. The wooden building is reconstructed because it had burnt down, but the ovens are the originals.
  There are barracks that you can go in and see displays that have been set up. One barrack had  original things such as the original SS Guardhouse. It also had prsioner uniforms and an SS uniforms. There was also a childs doll and some empty Zyclon B cans. Lastly, there is a display case with hair that had been shaved from the victims. There is another barrack building that contains thousands of pairs of shoes.      That was the display that got to me.
   At the top of the hill there is a large round memorial and several open ditches next to it. That is the spot where the Nazi's shot 18,000 people and put them in mass graves. They eventually dug them up and cremated them and the memorial sits over the ashes of those 18,000 people. There is a saying on the memorial which translates "Let Our Fate Be A Warning To You".      That was my fist visit to an extermination camp and even though I had read many books about the Holocaust I was so busy preparing myself for the visit to Auschwitz that  some of what I saw at Majdanek took me by surprise.
   Throughout our visit to Majdanek we kept seeing a group of school kids from Israel. We knew they were from Israel because they all had white sweatshirts on that said Israel. We talked to someone who we thought was a chaperone and he said that yes they were a school group visiting some of the death camps. We sat and watched them for a while and to our surprise we realized that they not only had chaperones with them, but they had private security AND a police escort. The man we had thought was a chaperone was one of the private security guys and he had earlier been watching us until we stopped to talk to him and he found out that we were visiting  from the U.S.  That is pretty sad if you ask me that even today a group of Jewish students need all that security. 
    After spending a few hours at Majdanek we drove on to Krakow where we would be spending the next 2 nights. We arrived in Krakow in the afternoon and checked into the Krakow Lodge Bed & Breakfast which we had booked at home on Expedia.com. It is a bed & breakfast in name only.  It is actually an adorable little efficiency apartment. It has a coffepot (coffee & tea provided), a refrigerater, stove, and plenty of dishes and silverware. It is about a 2 minute walk to the store where you can pick up your provisions. Eva is a wonderful hostess and very helpful. Free parking too !!!!  
    We ended up taking a walk to the Royal Castle (Zamek Krolewski) and Wawel Hill that afternoon to see the Cathedral and to over look the Vistula River. Then we walked back to the hotel.