31/07/2010

A 12 hour tour from Lublin to Wlodawa, Sobibor, Belzec and Zamosc

Breakfast at the Wakesman was very nice - salate, bread, eggs and yogurt with coffee and orange- a much needed hearty start to a long day.

Slawomir and his wife pick me up at 8am, as we travel out of Lublin we see a grand procession of pilgrimages: further emphasising along with the adorned crosses by roadsides and elaborate churches that seem to crop up out of nowhere- just how religious Poland is. I am told this pilgrimage will be a 2 week, 300km march. The first stop was a small town called Wlodawa- it is a beautiful small town known as the "town of three cultures", whilst the Jewish community no longer resides here there is still a festival of three cultures every September- Orthodox, Catholic and Jewish. The synagogua complex has been restored (in part) to its former beauty and is used to display artefacts of Jewish life in the town. Slawomir tells me that the Jewish and Christian society worked side-by-side in a co-operative in towns like this. Before we hit the town though Slawomir shows me the border of the EU- Ukraine is across the river Bug.

Our next stop is the Sobibor memorial, here the signs and train tracks are still place (freight train go through here). There is a small museum in Polish, but Slawomir translates. At the back of the old camp site is the original Soviet memorial- a brick chimney and a red stone carving of a mother and child. Since this, archaeological investigations have uncovered the grounds of the gas chamber- which is marked by a clearing and sign. The site of the mass graves and make-shift crematoriums the sand and dust from the area has been collected and placed on a stone mound: a tomb of ashes. 250,000 people were murder at this camp. The newest addition to the memorial complex are:

-The road to heaven pathway (memorial avenue) marked with named, sponsored memorial stones, then at the front of the complex is a monument commemorating 50 years since the Sobibor rising. The complex (as it is now) was built in 1993 with the museum, when survivors pushed for the kindergarten in this hut to close and for the site to become a memorial site.

From Sobibor we do the 2 hour trip to Belzec, unlike Sobibor and Treblinka Belzec is not deserted deep in woodland, but is was on the edge of a village (and is now a fully fledged town). Slawomir explains that the site was long forgotten and the memorial was not built until 2004. It contains a heart wrenching museum exhibition supported by clips from Lanzmann's Shoah, a detailed timeline of the events of Aktion Reinhard, personal artifacts found on the site, a model and plan of the site and the haunting testimony of the one survivor of Belzec (Rudolph Reder, there was one other escapee, however he was shot during the Nazi war crimes trials.) This is the quote that hit hard in both the testimony and engraves in the tin/ iron memorial wall:

"We moved like automated figures, just one large mass of them. We just mechanically worked through our horrible existence … Every day we died a little bit together with the transports of people.

When I heard children calling [in the gas chamber]: "Mommy, haven't I been good? It's dark," my heart would break. Later we stopped having feelings."

The museum also explain how the Nazis involved in testing and setting up Belzec where those that have been involved in the euthanasia programme in Germany (Operation T4). Here at least 500,000 people (1/2 a million) were murdered within 4 hours of arriving at the platform arc. The space Belzec occupied is smaller than my place of work. The museum (like that at Sobibor) ends with images and a brief background of some of the known victims. There are no exact records though. The testimony in the museum explains how the more assimilated, Western Jews were given postcards to send to their loved ones in order to keep up the pretence that tis was a work camp.

There are a couple of reports from the Polish resistance to the Allies (and Polish Government in Britain) which were ignored, displayed in both museums. Sobibor is funded by local council, Belzec part of the Majadnek museum and funded by national government. Slawomir explains that it was obvious to the resistance that these were extermination sites, one had even bribed Ukrainian guards to allow him to dress up as a guard and enter the camp to get eye witness reports - which were sent to England- but simply were not believed.

The central memorial at Belzec is utterly moving- stones mark out the entire site, the darker patches mark the 33 mass graves that have been found during excavations. The site is a square (Risen at the back), around the edges each community is listed in chronological order of their dispatch to the camp.In the centre there is a passage way (it was closed for refurbishment) at the end is a high wall with the frequently quoted passage from Job: "Earth conceal not my blood" (also seen at Sobibor and Treblinka). The wall, like the chimney at Treblinka, is in part, suppose to represent the Wailing Wall relating back to Jewish culture.

Opposite this structure and to the side of the main gate is a stack of wooden slates (Actually from the Treblinka site)- these act as a memorial to the burning of the bodies. This is an awful site: so small, so insignificant, tuck just past what was an old village, yet a site with such a terrible and brutal history. The simple structure of the memorial is both respectful and powerful. I don't think we will ever been able to understand what made a group of people so sadistic that they would create such elaborate cover ups, torture and kill millions of people in this way.

Whilst Sobibor had an original Soviet memorial, Belzec did not, though the memorial at Sobibor was to commemorate the "Soviet victims" (to some extent fictitious).

After Belzec- we stop for lunch One thing Slawomir and I discuss is the fad of Holocaust tourism exhibited a little for us at Sobibor and I am told is even more present at Auschwitz (Slawomir tells me that most people seriously interested in the Holocaust now despise the site)- at Sobibor a couple with their young children meandered around the memorial site giggling and shouting, only to take "posed" photos of each other in front of the chimney- why would you do this?

I also discovered that the two of them lived in Reading until August of last year, we discuss the racist believes of many English people and how this in part made them homesick and they returned to Poland. In Poland 95% of the society is Polish, they are not use to feeling victimized in modern society because of ethnicity- they related that some people blamed the Polish for the recession in England and could be horrible. The three of us come to a conclusion that we all share a dislike for the Ukraine, Russia and Birmingham!!

For lunch I have pierogi z ruski- very tasty,but very filling- excellent for 14 zl including a drink!

From the restaurcaja we head to Zamosc- it is a beautiful old fortress town built on the foundations of tolerance. I am shown the Old Baroque synagogue- it is marvellous, but is sadly is not used. It has been a library until recently, but is now under renovations as it has been given back to the Jewish community of Lublin. He takes me to the Rotundy (which I know nothing about) - the Nazis used this tiny site with its 10 holding cells as a transit and execution site. At one stage they aimed to wipe out the entire community of Zamosc to make it the capital of the new German settlements "Himmerland", they were sent to concentration camps, death camps or, for some of the children they were put into the Aryanization programme. The park grounds that lead to the site are covered in commemorative graves for the different communities killed or kept here.

In contrast to this Zamosc has a beautiful large park, Slawomir calls it "his local Hampton Court"! Tour of Lublin and Madjanek then off to Krakow tomorrow- excited! Been looking forward to this part of the tour more than anything!!

It seems to me that whilst in Warsaw the commemoration is very much linked to the sense of Polish solidarity and strength, at the Aktion Reinhard sites commemoration has been Juadanized and a focus has also been on education: to make sure this is "never again". This has happened post-Soviet era, so has taken a while to come to fruition. The consideration of material (stone), the use of names/ communities displayed, ashes and dust, representations of gas chambers and of Jewish culture- wailing wall and Torah phrases- all make these places sacred sites of memorial.