Majdanek Concentration Camp
When visiting family and friends throughout Poland, my wife and I stopped by Majdanek concentration camp. This sobering walkthrough was a stark reminder of humanity's capacity to treat their fellow man inhumanely. Walking through provided a tangible background to all of the history lessons I received on WWII and the Holocaust, and I won't ever forget the trip.
Majdanek was a German concentration and extermination camp built on the outskirts of the city of Lublin, Poland. The camp was used to kill people on an industrial scale from October 1, 1941, until July 22, 1944. It was captured nearly intact, because the rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army. Therefore, Majdanek became the first concentration camp discovered by Allied forces.
Memorial at the "entry gate" to the camp. The symbolic pylon is meant to represent mangled bodies. It looks like an abstracted Yiddish sign for Lublin: לובלין
The Mausoleum erected in 1969 contains ashes and remains of cremated victims, collected into a mound after liberation of the camp in 1944. The sheer size of this mausoleum is what really hits you. Looking and walking around the mound of discarded ashes. The crematorium is right beside this monument and allows you to easily connect the two locations. It doesn't take much imagination to draw yourself back to the horrendous moments that created these discarded bones.
The shoes are the most drastic image one can take away from this tour. Just grasping that every two of these shoes used to be a human being. Used to be someone with a story, a family, a life and plan before the war and this nightmare. The sheer amount of shoes just claws at you. I've seen the similar exhibit at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., but it paled in comparison to the amount of injustice visible in these cages. The official estimate of 78,000 victims, of those 59,000 Jews, was found in 2005 by Tomasz Kranz, director of the Research Department of the State Museum at Majdanek.
Sorry for the walk through complete and utter sadness. But, its good to always remember the atrocities of history so we do not repeat them in the future.
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It's a really nice picture ! well captured photo
Elrond Huston Aka ehuston
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