A murder of crows-- Majdanek

This isn't my photograph, but it shows something similar to what greeted us when we arrived at Majdanek.  The phrase "murder of crows" sounds ominous, but the meaning is less sinister.  The PBS program "Nature" recently aired an episode on crows and offered a summary of the program and its reception on their website.  Among the responses was this one:  "Crows are ... empathetic with our loss. ... The Blackfoot teach that in the ancient times, the crow had its same shape but was the most colorful of all birds. And all other birds were solid black, as the brother crow is now. One by one, the species came to the crow and asked for a color. And each time the crow give away a color. Eventually the crow had only brown, but the lowly sparrow came and asked, and so the crow gave away even that so it had no color. It became black. For its selflessness and infinite generosity, the Blackfoot revere the crow ... ."

The crows we encountered seemed to be witnesses from a time past.  They made their presence felt.

This camp was the first of the five we visited, one of two extermination camps. One of the noteworthy features of Majdanek is the fact that a Lublin suburb is less than a kilometer from the camp borders.

We saw people walking from the apartment buildings nearby through the camp.  Most strikingly, we saw a father bring his two little girls (one was a toddler) through the gate into the camp.  There was something so blasé about the way this threesome strolled past the tower,

parallel to the camp fence,

past the "baths, disinfection, gas chamber"

and down the path made of the broken tombstones from Jewish graves.

I have to acknowledge, it was disconcerting to see this trio making their casual "spaziergang" through this horrific site.

Tomasz Kranz, in his book, The Extermination of Jews at Majdanek Concentration Camp,  says
"Majdanek's functions underwent partial changes even during the planning stage.  From a camp created for the needs of Globocnik [Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin District], it evolved into one of the elements of the 'SS state', i.e. the system of Nazi concentration camps." Majdanek was a Prisoner of War Camp, a labor camp (construction and manufacturing), and, Yad Vashem says "The camp's official purpose was to destroy enemies of the Third Reich, help carry out the extermination of the Jews, and take part in the deportations and 'resettlement' of the Poles living in the Zamosc region of the General gouvernement.  In all, approximately 360,000 victims perished at Majdanek."

As we toured the camp, there were a number of featured statements from former prisoners posted on placards, such as this one regarding "reception":
Along come several SS men whose ranks I cannot recognize, and they order us to enter an empty barracks.  There we must undress and hold all our valuables and clothing under our arms.  That's the order.  We stand there naked and wait.  The double gates of the stable-type barracks are wide open, and we get goose bumps.  The reading of the transport list finally begins; those whose names are called cross to the other side.  Reading out seven hundred names takes a long time.  The ones called out leave behind their clothing and food supplies, which no one marks with a name or number. [...]  They set up a table where we register and obtain numbers  stamped on tags cut from tin cans.  [...]  Registration, or rather the taking of things on deposit, again lasts a long time.  I am shivering all over my body.  Finally they order us into the shower in groups of one hundred.  Naked and barefoot, we run across the frozen group to an adjacent building, about a hundred meters away.  In the cloakroom sit several barbers, Slovakian Jews, who shave off the hair on our heads, our mustaches, the hair under our arms, and all over our bodies.

The selection site was outside of the bath/disinfection/gas chamber, euphemistically called Rosengarten.

After showering, prisoners had to immerse themselves in baths of disinfectant.

Following that initial "ritual" prisoners bathed infrequently and rarely changed underwear.


Majdanek had five gas chambers, operational from September 1942 to September 1943.  Most of the victims of the gas chamber were Jews, but elderly and sick prisoners from other backgrounds were also victims of the gas chamber.

The "Prussian blue" color at the back of this gas chamber is residue from Zyklon B.  The Nazis also used carbon monoxide to kill their victims.

The camp is considered a museum, and as such, a number of barracks contain displays which offer photos (of both prisoners and perpetrators), artifacts, maps and statistical charts.

Another barrack included the bunks prisoners used.

Majdanek was also involved in SS enterprises and warehouses.  Kranz writes that "Several thousand Jewish men and women worked [in Operation Reinhard's central sorting plant] unloading, sorting and cleaning clothing and footwear brought by train from ghettoes and death camps.  After disinfecting and sorting, stolen property was sent by rail to the Reich."

The Majdanek Guide says that of the 300,000 objects in the museum's exhibition, the overwhelming majority consist of the 260,000 shoes belonging to the victims of Majdanek and the other camps involved in Operation Reinhard.

The monuments at Majdanek are noteworthy.  We encountered this column, erected by Polish prisoners of war in May of 1943.

The Majdanek Guide quotes the creator of the column, Albin Maria Boniecki, as saying, "We gave the birds the form of half-doves, half-eagles.  The dove is a symbol of the innocent soul, and the eagle of the nation and victory.  I linked the birds in a symbol of victory  and embodied them as a trio of Man,  Woman and Child with their feet resting on the globe they are protecting."

While the Nazi SS perceived the column as embracing the Nazi emblem, the prisoners "secretly placed the remains of victims inside the base of the column."

We concluded our tour of the camp grounds with a visit to the Mausoleum under which rests the kurhan mound of the remains of those who died at the camp. 

We saw the execution ditches from the platform of the Mausoleum.

We were fortunate to meet with the director of the museum for almost two hours before leaving for Izbica.  Before heading southeast for the cemetery, we stopped to take a picture of The Monument to Struggle and Martyrdom.

The Monument gate alludes to The Gates of Hell in Dante's Divine Comedy.  It is recognized as the symbol of Majdanek around the world.