In many ways, this was the hardest day of the trip for me,
not logistically, but emotionally.
Logistically, everything went far smoother than last time. We reached Belzec from Lublin in a little
less than 2 and a half hours.
I knew there was no food for purchase anywhere near the
camp, nor is eating permitted in the memorial site, so I warned the students
that they would need to pack a meal.
There are no chairs, benches or tables, so we sat on a small, raised
curb in the parking lot where they put flags during ceremonies. Behind us, we could see the entry to the
camp, written in iron letters that are intentionally rusting, leaving stains
down the concrete that resemble blood.
We began by touring the information center. The area of the center is quite small, but I
did warn the students that they may find the room of reflection somewhat
disturbing. The museum is really quite
small, but packs an incredible punch for such a small space. Where there are pages to turn, they are bound
to a heavy, dark metal plate that makes a scraping noise as you turn it. I pointed out some of the officers from the
camp that the text highlights, like Oberhauser and Höfle.
The director Claude Lanzmann tracked Oberhauser down in the
late ‘70s, after he had been released after he had only served 4.5 years for
participating in the murder of half a million Jews. Sure enough, they had that clip playing around
the corner. Höfle was the officer who
met with Czerniakow in July 1942 to organize the murder of the Jews of Warsaw.
After Czerniakow failed to receive any assurances from him about the fate of
the orphans, he committed suicide rather than participate in the deportations
to Treblinka.
Around the corner was a diagram of the camp and excerpts
from Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah.
It’s always surprising to me how many people were murdered in such a
small space. I explained to the students
how this was scheduled murder: the Nazis
had to make sure that not too many victims were sent to the camp at the same
time, so as to not overwhelm the ability of the Sonderkommando to burn
their bodies.
After a model of the gas chambers, labeled in German, “Bath
and Inhallation” and with a Jewish star over the door there is a single
sentence, repeated in Polish, Hebrew, and English, on a metal slab stretching
from floor to ceiling. It’s a quote said
by a child inside the gas chamber to her mother and was heard by Rudolf Reder,
a member of the Sonderkommando and the only survivor of Belzec who lived
to give testimony.
The first time I saw this in 2006, I turned pale and
fled. The next time I did my best to
avoid looking at it. Even two years ago,
I tried to avoid reading it. As we were
talking afterwards, one of the students mentioned it and I started crying. It profoundly affects me every time.
The museum includes artifacts they found when they prepared
the site to construct the memorial.
These include stone tokens given to the victims to recover their
clothing after their “showers” and some of the Star of David armbands that had
been on their clothing in the ghetto.
At the end is a map, showing the systematic murder of the
Jews of southern Poland. Month by month,
Jewish communities light up in blue as they are murdered. Like stars in a dying galaxy, they flare up
and then go out.
Beyond that is the “roof of reflection.” To get to it, one must pull open a tall, heavy,
metal door at the end of a concrete corridor.
Beyond that is a large, dimly lit, cool concrete room. Beyond a small Polish plaque in stone, the
room is completely empty. The sound of the metal door slamming shut on the empty
concrete room often unnerves students.
The space is meant to be disturbing, and the empty echoes on the plain
concrete floor meant to convey, emptiness, fear, and hopelessness.
After talking for a while outside, we began to tour the
memorial itself. The surface of the
memorial is covered in a mix of slag, ash, and impoverished soil, with burnt
metal sticking out here and there. Every
now and then, a tiny green shoot peeks through, but they are not allowed to
grow and are periodically removed.
Cutting through this field of dark and blasted stones is a path tracing
the way the victims walked to the gas chamber.
The floor of this path is paved with cobble stones taken from numerous
Jewish ghettos. The walls of undulating
rough grey concrete rise up on either side, higher and higher as one approaches
the heart of the memorial, until one is entirely cut off.
At the end is a large stone wall, carved in Hebrew, English,
and Polish with a text from the Book of Job. Opposite is a list of common names
of people sent to this place to be murdered.
I found my great grandmother’s name and read the Yizkor prayer
for those murdered in the Holocaust, first in Hebrew and then in English.
To continue the tour, we climbed the stairs and found the
alphabetical list of cities and towns from whence Jews were deported here to be
murdered. Their grave is the vast field
of stones and their tombstones are these city names. I found the marker for the ghetto my great
grandmother was imprisoned in and deported from.
We found a sliver of shade and talked about the memorial and
its design. After that I bought a new
book on the camp and we got on the bus and headed away.
Since our drive takes us through Zamosc, I thought it would
be nice to stop there for a breath of air.
The town was commission in the 16th century by Count Jan
Zamoyski, who wanted to build a town to develop trade in the region. He brought
over an architect from Padua, who designed the town around a classic Renaissance
square (though the large town hall was added over half a century later).
From there we went to the Sephardi synagogue. When I first came to Zamosc in 2006, this was
still the community library. Now, it’s
small exhibition space.
Eli Zolkos, who
sold us our tickets, turns out to be a leader of the Jewish Defense League in
Poland. His website is full of praise
for Rabbi Meir Kahane, ימח שמו. Kahane was a racist
son of a bitch. I saw him once in
Jerusalem in 1984 or ’85; he was the only person I ever met who could make
Hebrew sound like German. Not happy to see this organization being revived and
very unhappy to see it here in Poland.
I gave the students an hour to explore the city or have some
food or buy souvenirs. I sat in the main
square and ordered a sundae. This was a
lovely, refreshing dish of two scoops of forest fruit ice cream along with a
scoop of vanilla, strawberry sauce, whipped cream, and fresh fruit. It definitely hit the spot.
After some difficulty, I managed to round up all the
students and get them on the bus back to Lublin.
For dinner, I went to a “Jewish style” restaurant in Lublin’s
historic rynek. I had walked by it many
times before but never eaten there. I
was tempted by the duck, but it was half of one and that was just too much, so
I got a steak instead, but started with the cabbage soup garnished with raisins
and almonds.
I had a very nice conversation with a lovely couple who come
to Lublin almost every year. The wife
got a Fulbright in 1984 to teach here in Lublin and recounted stories of the
really bad old days. Her husband has
been installing an art installation in a neighborhood. I asked him about some art I had seen hanging
in a tree in Zamosc and the husband said he knew the artist, but couldn’t
remember his name. He’s going to get
back to me when he does.
As I was finishing dinner, I could see flashes of
lightening, so I called for the bill and paid. Just then it started to rain, so
I took cover in the restaurant. Within a
minute, there was a torrential downpour.
Everyone sitting outside rushed in.
I found a chair in the lobby, about three meters from the door, and two
meters beyond that to the rain, but the wind was so strong, I could feel the
water that far away.
I found wifi and logged on to the internet. After telling me the chance of rain today was
0%, it said that the rain would stop by 9:15 (in 35 minutes). Pretty soon, though, the rain was dying down,
and by 8:55, it was safe to leave.
The sky was dramatically red, and I could hear music when I
reached the pedestrian mall in the city center.
I walked over and saw that they had lit up the fountains and small
children were splashing through them and dance music played loudly.
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