Catching Up: Wednesday Sobibor, Majdanek, Lublin

Sorry about the lack of posts over the last 2 days circumstances were out of our control with internet access and arrival 0 but we had a very meaningful last 2 days in Poland. After our visit to Lancut and Belzec we spent a lighthearted night in Chelm and shared many stories of the "wise" people of that town. Before we departed Chelm for Warsaw, I shared Isaac Bashevis Singer's story, "When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw." In the story Shlemiel leaves Chelm for an adventure in Warsaw only to be tricked by a townsperson while he was sleeping and ending back in Chelm although he thinks he is in another town that is an exact copy. fortunately we made it to the real Warsaw that evening.

Our first stop on Tuesday morning was at Sobibor. This death camp was the murder site of 250,000 Jews between May 1942 and October 1943. On October 15, 1943 an uprising of the Jewish prisoners took place and 53 eventually escaped alive. Today there is no trace left of the camp which was completely destroyed in the Fall of 1943 by the Nazis. Norman Ravski did a wonderful job of teaching us all about what happended at this terrible place.

While we were at Sobibor both Steven Wasserman and Daniel Ben Chitrit saw the names of relatives who, they beleived were murdered there, on the rocks lining what was the Himelstrasse (path to the gas chambers) that have been placed as part of the memorial.

After our visit to Sobibor, we drove to the city of Lublin where we first stopped at the Yeshivah Chochmei Lublin, a mgnificent structure that was built in 1930 by Rabbi Meir Shapiro as one of the finest places of Jewish learning in Poland. while we were there Rabbi Yaffe gave a great overview of the history of Hassidism as yet another Jewish response to the sometimes dangeorus world that Polish Jewry lived in. While there we joined with the Australian delegation for Hallel in honor of Rosh Chodesh. (sorry I didn;t take any pictures here)

After the Yeshiva we drove a short 15 minutes to the outskirts and Lublin and the death camp of Majdanek, which is strikingly close to the city and main highway as it was during the war. Unlike the 2 camps we had visited just prior to Majdanek, Belzec and Sobibor, which were both used strictly as killing centers and dimantled by the Nazis after the "work" had been completed in 1943, Majdanek, like Birkenau was also used as a forced labor camp and some of it, including some barracks, a gas chamber, and a partially restored crematorium are all still in tact. Majdanek was a place where approximately 250,000 prisoners were murdered by the Nazis, about half of whom were Jews with the remainder being prisoners of war from 11 countries, mostly the Soviet Union, and other Polish political prisoners as well. Claire provided an in depth overview of the camp and then the students explored on thier own finishing their visit first at the site of the "Harvest Festival," which took place on November 3, 1943 when in retaliation for the Warsaw ghetto and Sobibor uprisings 4,00 Jews from Majdanek as well as 14,000 Jews from labor camps in Lublin were driven to pits dug at the rear of the camp, forced to lay down and shot by the SS. Our final visit was a pile of human ash remains that were collected from the camp and placed in a large mausoleum. It was a very in your face emotional experience for everyone.