After Ingrid and I left Warsaw, we drove southeast, to a town called Lublin:
I had been here once, and thought it was a good idea to stretch our legs in Lublin. Ingrid agreed.
Lublin has about 350.000 inhabitants and is often called “little Krakow”. It does have a charming old town…
… and lots of churches!
Outside town is Majdanek,
a Nazi German concentration and extermination camp established on the outskirts of the city of Lublinduring the German occupation of Poland in World War II. Although initially purposed for forced labor rather than extermination, the camp was used to kill people on an industrial scale during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Jews within theirGeneral Government territory of Poland.[1] The camp, which operated from October 1, 1941 until July 22, 1944, was captured nearly intact, because the rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration prevented the SS from destroying most of its infrastructure; but also, due to the ineptitude of commandant Anton Thernes who failed in his task of removing incriminating evidence of war crimes. Majdanek, also known to the SS as Konzentrationslager Lublin, remains the best preserved Nazi concentration camp of the Holocaust.[2]
We kept close to the monument, which represents mangles bodies:
Another charming town is Jaroslaw. Invaded by the Tatars and the Austrians, it came back to Poland in the beginning of the 20th century. During World War II, most of the Jews fled the town; those who stayed behind were immediately executed by the Nazis.
