It was a chilly early fall day when we reached Lublin, Poland. The lights were shining brightly across an expansive park when our comfortable bus reached the empty parking lot of the CONCENTRATION CAMP.
The rest of our group filed off, but I hung around. I took off my coat, a dress shirt, and undershirt and walked down the steps to feel the cold afternoon air on my bare chest. I put the shirt back on and walked into Majdanek, one of several killing factories in Germany and Poland where the Nazis were murdering Jews and other unworthies with the efficiency of a Volkswagen industrial plant.
Tuesday was the 80th anniversary of American soldiers liberating Auschwitz. My memories return of walking through its smaller cousin, Majdanek, sitting across from the quiet park in the town of Lublin.
I looked at the registry at the entrance and then walked by the double deck bunks. From there it was a short walk across the hall to the furnaces. The Nazis didn’t want to waste space. I had dreamt of this moment since I was a teenager in Chicago after watching movies and a TV series about the Holocaust.
And there it was–floors clean, ovens side by side and compact. Unimaginable, yet there I was, with other Jewish tourists, on a detour from a business trip, in the nondescript killing factory next to a pleasant quiet city park.
The visit was 25 years ago, 55 years after Majdanek had been liberated and the ragged survivors were welcomed into first aid tents. Today, some of their great-grandchildren are hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza. More innocent Jews were massacred at the music festival in the Negev Desert in Israel on October 7, 2023. This week, an Israeli Government Minister was held back from a European meeting in Brussels, Belgium, for fear of being attacked.
A picture of one of the few living survivors of Auschwitz, dressed in concentration camp blue stripes, was on the cover of Tuesday’s Wall Street journal. I’ll never forget that day in Majdanek, walking past the ovens and imagining the horrible shrieks in my ears.
7 Comments
Mine, too.
noun
noun: genocide; plural noun: genocides
the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
“a campaign of genocide”
Are humans any better today?
Lloyd, thanks for sharing your moving personal experience. Let us never forget.
Thank you for sharing this important story. It’s as relevant today as ever.
Lloyd, your message is clear to most of us, but I’m not sure it’s resonating with the public at large. We now have Elon Musk throwing Nazi salutes and supporting the politics of hate around the world…all with the enthusiastic support of trump and the republican party. As much as voters were fed up with the status quo, we have a much worse problem on our hands. The first trump tariffs hurt my manufacturing business and we’re still paying for the disruption and unsustainable cost increases , but the next round will finish it off completely. I will likely be coming to you for liquidation services.
Lawrence, I hope you don’t take this wrong, but I’m sorry there is a need for the need to show me why? I am seriously ignorant. Inflation has hurt me also. It has hurt my friends also. Simple friends. simple as even in the restaurant business. Eggs were $2 a dozen 2 years ago, now 6 and 7 dollars a dozen when they use 75 dozen a day and the have not been able to raise their prices!!!!!!!! Am I not comprehending something?? I am a machinist and see the same thing happening to tool steel and aluminum. Why are you different than the rest of us???? The poor lady on the corner in the restaurant business does not have the Graff family to buy or auction off her store to save her tail. I doubt they would waste the phone call to save my one-man 16 x 20 shop!!!!
I lost many members of my extended family to the Holocaust. However, some also were fortunate enough to be able to come to this country before WWII started. God bless America!!!
However, today I am truly saddened to see so many hate filled people from the far left and far right, on campus, at the UN, and at other demonstrations.
Why can’t we all just get along?