SUNDAY JULY 12TH-A SAD DAY IN POLAND

Our guide, Alex, picked us up at 9AM and we headed to the town of Zamosc where our ancestors had lived.  On the way we made a stop in Lublin, Poland to visit a place called Majdanek, the only one of Hitler's death camps that was liberated intact.  In all the other camps, as the allies were getting closer in the Spring of 1945, the German soldiers tried to destroy the evidence of what they had done.  For some reason, the commandant of this camp fled without destroying any part of the camp.  Althought I could have taken pictures throughout, I didn't take any pictures of the gas chambers or the ovens.  It's an eerie feeling to walk on the same floors that more than 150,000 Jews and other enemies of the Third Reich walked on, and see the actual bunks in the barracks that the prisoners occupied.  There is a monument at the front of the camp that is the first photo.

During my time at Majdanek I felt like there were 150,000 ghosts that I walked among.  The last photo is of the Mausoleum that was constructed as a Memorial.  It's a very moving with stairs to a circular walkway around a deep open pit.  The pit is filled with the ashes of the more than 150,000 victims murdered by the Germans.  The sight is overwheming and it seemed wrong to photograph it.  While looking at this huge hill of ashes I saw what appeared to be a lot of stones in the ashes.  On closer examination I saw that what I thought were stones were actually fragments of bone.  This is the Mausoleum at Majdanek.