Travel Stories - Poland

On September 18, 1939, the Nazis entered the city of Lublin and in the summer of 1941, by order of Heinrich Himmler, began construction of the Madjanek concentration and extermination camp. First it was decided to build the camp at the cemetery "Lipowa", after which it was decided to build the camp outside the city of Lublin near the village "Madjan Tatarski". The camp was divided into 10 zones with 20 barracks and 3 gas chambers but would in the future count over 250,000 prisoners. This made the camp the largest in total behind Auschwitz. Among other things tombstones from the Jewish cemetery in Lublin were used to finish it. The camp was originally intended as a prisoner of war camp and the first prisoners were 5,000 Russian prisoners of war. Afterwards, Jewish Poles were also brought from Lublin. From the year 1942 the camp was used as an extermination camp for Jews from many European countries. Initially, the victims were executed in the nearby forest where they were buried in mass graves. Later they were often gassed, first by carbon monoxide, then with Zyklon B though the executions and hangings continued too.

Before the crematorium was built, the bodies were burned by placing them on car chassis in the open air. "Aktion Erntefest" was started in November 1943 and aimed to accelerate the destruction of the Jews. This is because in the camps "Sobibor" and "Treblinka" uprisings occured and the Nazis were afraid that they would jump to other camps. The action costed 42,000 Jews' lives. They were thrown into mass graves, dug by the victims themselves. The documentation that should indicate the number of victims have been destroyed by the Nazis, as in other camps, before their departure. For that reason, the number of deaths is unknown but the number of 300,000 is the most acceptable. From a 2005 study this number would be significantly lower; some 78,000 including 59,000 Jews. On July 24, 1944, the Red Army arrived in the hastily cleared camp. The Nazis had only time to destroy the crematorium. The Russians foudn about only hundreds of prisoners still alive. In the same month it was already decided that the camp should be kept and that it would be set up as a museum. The Nazi leaders from the camp had already been executed by their own people; others were taken away and killed by the Russians.

In the 6th century, various settlements arose at the location of present-day Lublin, where people engaged in trade and industry. To protect the city and the rest of Poland from Tartar, Lithuanian and Ruthenian attacks from the east, the city was given orders by "Casimir the Great" in 1341 to put up a defense, such as city walls and a castle. Despite that, Lublin was destroyed many times and rebuilt after attacks by invading armies from the east. It was here in the city in 1569 that the largest state so far was located in Europe; Lithuania together with Poland. When the country was split for the third time, Lublin and the region came to Austria and for some time it was part of the Duchy of Warsaw under the rule of Napoleon. After WWI, an independent government was formed here for Poland for the first time, and even for some time the government was here.

Lublin became a Nazi headquarters for operation "Reinhard" - the beginning of the final solution that we would call the "Holocaust". In March 1941 the ghetto of Lublin was officially put into use but a year earlier the Jewish inhabitants of the nearby "Wieniawa" were already dumped in the city because the area was necessary to serve as a recreation park for the SS. The ghetto was located in the oldest and poorest part of the historic Jewish quarter in the old city. Lublin at the moment counted about 40,000 Jews - that was one third of the total population. Until March 1942, the Lublin ghetto was not strictly closed so that food could be smuggled from the outside inside. At the beginning of March it was divided in two parts; the so-called large ghetto was for the unemployed, while in the small the Jewish council and its institutions was established. The latter was closed with barbed wire. On 16 March, the large ghetto was surrounded by SS and Ukrainian guards and the Jewish Council demanded that some 1,500 Jews had to leave for the East for work - in reality they were taken to extermination camp "Belzec" that as built just for extermination and is situated near the border with Ukraine nowadays. On April 14 of that year the deportations stopped and the ghetto was moved to transport from there several thousand to Madjanek. In November 1942 the last group of Jews were taken to the camp. Some 250 Jews from Lublin were liberated from various concentration camps after the liberation and some were in hiding. During the Second World War, the Provisional Communist government was put up here by the Russians and at the end of 1944 it was once again the capital. In the years between the two world wars (the interwar period) 40% of the Lublin population was Jewish - the largest part died in the extermination camps in Belzec and Madjanek. According to some, Lublin is the city where the demonstrations and strikes really took of against the Communist government that eventually led to their downfal.