Majdanek Tour

Majdanek concentration camp. Men's bathhouse.

Usually bathed in there newly arrived prisoners.

In this barracks, at the end of the hall there was a gas chamber, which was used to disinfection of clothing or to kill small groups of convicted.

New prisoners often received clothes after the dead, stained with blood, and had to wear this clothes.

For Jewish women, brought from the Warsaw ghetto, Germans gave dresses and hats, instead of striped uniforms. Just to they look grotesque. In order to psychologically destroy the woman. Debase them. But despite the bloody and shabby clothes, no one dared to take them out for the night, because at morning there would not stay nothing to looking for.

Next to food, overcoat decided about the chances of surviving the next day. Therefore all looked like one gray, dirty pile of mud.

Majdanek. Corridor connecting bath with a gas chamber.
Newly arrived after selection or go to the bath and then to the barracks in the camp, or when they were in the elderly, with a visible disability - they waited on the selection square in the so-called Rose Garden (Rosengarten) a few hours on their turn to the gas chamber.

To handle the bunker chosen Jewish prisoners or prisoners of the Red Army. They created Leichenkommando.

Systematic and according to plan, every few months, members of this group were murdered and replaced by prisoners of the same origin.

SS-mans murdered people in the chambers were called paramedics.

Majdanek. The residential barrack for the prisoners.
According to the documentation it was designed for 48 horses, but at the greatest density were placed here 500 to 800 people.

From the memoirs of prisoner:

"At some moment we stand up, they separate us from men, we go further, to the end of the camp.

They bring us finally to a completely empty yard.

It is surrounded by barracks covered with snow, in the middle - deep, blocking snow.

 

The SS barely open door of the first barrack, half of the window broken, in the second the same, and finally tell us to go to the third.
Here, too, the lack of a few windows, terrible cold.

 

The three-tiered bunks with straw mattresses and blankets, a small iron stove, so-called goat. [...]

We lie down, but terrible cold does not allow to fall asleep. [...]
Morning blankets are so frozen to our clothes that we detach them struggling.

Cold in the barracks is terrible.

 

We go outside. I look across the yard, behinds the barracks

I see dug cloacal pits without any protection against snow and frost. [...]

Majdanek. Crematorium.

Currently, reconstructed after an attempt to destroy by Germans.

Placed inside furnaces were connected by underground canals with 12-meter chimney.

Combustion temperature reached 700 C, which allowed to burn body within 15 minutes.

If the number of victims was too high in relation to the possibility of stoves, the bodies was laid on grates made from rails and, before burning, poured gasoline. Unburned bones were ground in special mills and scattering around the area.

Currently, in the part of the monument called Mausoleum - kept ground mixed with the ashes of prisoners.

To wind not to blow them around - the area was covered with so-called glass water.