I took so many notes and what I am left with is this:
The earth is weeping in these places.
I turn to poetry because I have no other language.
I could try and tell it like a fairy tale: the long winding drive out to a place called Sobibor though a lush green countryside in the rain, going deeper and deeper into the forest, tall pine trees, denuded, reaching up to the sky.
There was a camp with a schlauch (a tube). The SS called it the Himmelfahrstrasse (Street to Heaven). It was a few meters wide and people were ushered along it, shaved, and then killed in a gas chamber. First they were buried, then they were disinterred and burned on a pyre, their ashes then buried again. This is a story we know.
There was a vegetable garden. They suspect it was fertilized by ashes. The same story is told in Majdanek of a vegetable garden fertilized by ashes mixed into manure.
Of the 34,313 Dutch Jews who walked off that ramp into the camp in the forest, 3 survived. They arrived in Pullman cars. They were forced to pay for their own tickets. There were special trains on Tuesdays and Fridays. The SS gave them postcards and some of them wrote home letting the people they loved know they were alive. The SS mailed the cards. I could not make this story up. An inscription on a drawing by Jozef Richter depicting one of the trains that carried Dutch Jews reads: “a train from the Netherlands. They know nothing. Pullmans, comfort, they will be dead within the hour.”
The Polish Jews arrived on freight trains and cattle trains. They knew where they were going.
Some people swallowed their jewelry. One survivor said “my heart was bleeding.”
On October 14, 1943, about 300 people tried to escape this pine-lined place where the barbed wire grew into the trees. One of the heroes nearly beheaded the deputy commandant — the highest ranking SS officer in the camp that day — with an ax. (In 2015, photos were discovered in his grandson’s attic of him and friends drinking and celebrating in Sobibor. One of his fellow officers in the pictures was called the “Gasmeister.” Later he’d be recognized in the street by one Estera Raab. He’d die in prison in 1980). But to return to this story: the heroes succeeded in killing eight other officers. They surprised them. 300 managed to escape, of which about 60 lived until at least the end of the war. The retaliation, however, was swift. Everyone left in the camp was murdered the next day.
Remember the names of the heroes. I will let those who want look for the names of the Nazis. I wrote them down, they’re in the books, but I don’t want to hold on to them. I do want to remember the heroes, may all their memories be a blessing. Alexander Pechersky; Lejba Felhendler; Tomasz Blatt; Regina Feldman; Estera Raab are just a few. Many lived into the 2000s, in New York, Santa Barbara, Tel Aviv. Miles and miles and miles away from a forest in Poland. Some came back to give testimony.
Remember Pechersky’s words, now on a museum wall: Those of you who survive, should bear witness to this. Let the world know what happened here.
This. This. This.
First they razed the camp. The forest continued to grow around it.
In 1965 some returned and held a first commemoration and laid a memorial near the foundation of the gas chambers. Concrete was laid atop the site of mass graves.
In 1970, there was just a clearing with a woodcutter’s house. Hunters sometimes used it too. And sometimes locals came to sift through the soil and ashes looking for gold. “They were poor,” said our guide. They were looters. Plunder. As if not enough had already been stolen.
In the 1980s, a local nursery opened in the forest house. It is hard to imagine the sound of live children in that place, of the sound of their feet.
Just a house in the forest, like in the fairy tales.
Since 1959, a Polish family has lived in the former residence of SS-Haupsturmfuhrer Franz Stangl. He died in prison in 1971 but lived free for nearly 20 years until his capture in Brazil in 1967. This Polish family are workers in the forestry industry. They live across the street from the ramp where the trains stopped in 1942-43. Approximately 180,000 Jews were killed just down a winding path through the forest. They could walk to the cemetery mound if they wanted to, but I would hazard a guess they have never taken that stroll in the woods. One day I expect the Museum will come up with the right price and they’ll sell their house. For now, the Museum wants to first buy that ramp, which is also privately owned.
The land next door to the Polish family living in that cruel house has slowly evolved. In 2012, it was taken over by the State Museum at Majdanek because, as our guide said, Poland had “finally decided this place had to be protected… the ashes can no more be bothered.” The plunder had already happened.
The Museum did not open until 2020, even though it had been officially established as a museum in 1993. It has been awarded multiple prizes including “special merit in commemorating the camp’s victims” and the EMYA — best museum in Europe — primarily due to an exhibit of found items. In 2023, an architectural team redid the schlauch — the long narrow path to the gas chambers. It has a tall concrete wall on one side and is lined in white marble stones, bone-like. Visitors walk on a parallel path alongside those tall pine trees. All paths end at a massive gray mound.
This is where Israelis start the tour. I imagine they sing HaTikvah at the edge of this dense and soggy forest that has absorbed the blood of our ancestors. The earth continues to seep, still releasing secrets, sometimes even a key to a house in the Netherlands.
Those people really thought they’d return home. But there was no fairy tale ending. All that remains is to keep telling their story. The trees cannot be the only witnesses.
This is just beautiful writing. Thank you.