To See or Not to See, That is the Question
By Ed Wisneski
Special to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


My wife's parents were incredulous when they learned that we would
be spending the Christmas holidays slogging through snow amidst abandoned
barracks, guard towers, barbed wire, ovens, "shower heads," and other
remnants of death camps in Poland where three million Jews, gypsies, gays,
and others deemed undesirable by the Nazis were exterminated between 1941
and 1945.

After the initial shock wore off, her mother remarked, "Did you know that
your great uncle assisted in the prosecution of the German war criminals
at the Nuremberg trials? I have some of his letters. I'll dig them out
of the cellar."

My mother thought we were crazy, too.

After hearing our plans, she retreated to her bedroom and returned with a
handful of tiny two-by-three inch, black-and-white snapshots. I had
never seen them in any of the photo albums she had assembled through
the years.

"This is why your father never wanted to take a vacation in Europe," she
said as she spread out photos of the Flossenburg concentration camp in
Germany.

"Your father helped liberate this camp," she said. "He destroyed the
pictures that showed the prisoners. They brought back too many
painful memories. But he kept these."

Until that moment, I had never known that the Holocaust had impacted my
own family. My parents were brought up not to talk about such things. For
some, like my late father, the psychological wounds never healed.

My initial motivation for traveling to Poland changed dramatically
after these revelations. When Rick Halperin, a human rights professor at
Southern Methodist University in Dallas, first organized the trip for a
small group of faculty, staff, and their spouses, I signed up because I
wanted to be the first from my immediate family to step foot on the native
soil of my father's parents, who had immigrated to the United States in
the early 1900's. I wanted to see Warsaw and Krakow. If I had to put
up with a few death camps along the way, it was worth it.

Unlike German concentration camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald, and
the one my father encountered, the Polish death camps existed solely to
provide the means to complete Hitler's "Final Solution to the Jewish
Problem," i.e. wiping them off the face of the earth. At the six Polish
camps - Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, and
Majdanek - 90 percent of the Jews in Poland, roughly 10 times the
population of Pittsburgh, was exterminated with frightening speed and
precision.

Halperin constantly took photos to use in his class. I asked how his
students reacted when he discussed the Polish death camps. He said
that most of them wanted to know why they had never heard of these places.
I had studied about Auschwitz-Birkenau and was faintly familiar with
Treblinka, but the others were as foreign to me as they were to Halperin's
undergraduates.

This trip is not for everyone. I admit I was very skeptical at first.
One can read about the Holocaust and absorb its lesson that if we do
nothing to halt rabid prejudice, it is capable of suspending a person's
conscience, some to the extreme where they become willing executioners of
the targets of their hatred. However, words fall far short of the impact
of actually seeing the evidence. I was not prepared for the emotions I
felt, and still feel, after witnessing these scenes of mass murder that
most people can only imagine.

We visited all the camps but Chelmno, the first in Poland where the Nazis
used gas to commit mass murder. Approximately 320,000 Jews - most from
the ghetto in Lodz, Poland - were crammed 50 to 70 at a time into Renault
trucks that looked like delivery vans. The enclosed space - 15 feet
long, nearly 7 feet wide, and 6 /1/2 feet high - was hermetically
sealed inside.

Our journey started in Warsaw, which has been remarkably restored since
the Nazis destroyed 80 percent of the city in World War II. The only
synagogue left standing (Nozyk) still conducts services today in the
heart of the ghetto where the Nazis had herded all the Jews and forced
them to live in deplorable conditions. The inhabitants of the Warsaw
Ghetto staged an uprising in 1943, but the Germans crushed the
insurrection and demolished the area.

Very little evidence of the ghetto remains. A monument salutes the
leaders of the uprising. At Along the 15-minute self-guided walk
called the Memorial Route to the Struggle and Martyrdom of the Jews
1940-43, 16 black granite blocks describe the people and events of that
dehumanizing period for Polish Jews. The Umschlagplatz Wall Monument
marks the point where the Nazis jammed 254,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto
[plus 110,000 from other parts of the city] into railroad cars for a
one-way ride to Treblinka, which is 60 miles northeast of Warsaw.
Approximately 870,000 Jews from 10 European countries perished there in
only 16 months. Only Auschwitz-Birkenau had more killings (1.5 million).

The bright, sunny day with trees glistening like icy spider webs belied
the somber significance of what we witnessed at Treblinka. Bundled like
Eskimos, we trudged through the woods, bordered by memorial plaques, and
entered the camp through the same spot where deported Jews and others had
been unloaded for their last train stop. Replicated railroad tracks
stretch about 100 yards. A detailed map shows what the place looked like
in 1942-43, including, incredibly, a zoo for families of the German
officers. The Nazis built two camps at Treblinka. Number I served as a
penal labor camp; number II, solely as a factory for systematic mass
murder. In 1943, 700 prisoners attempted to escape, but only a few
survived.

After proceeding up a small incline, we stopped dead in our tracks
and gazed at an unforgettable, stunning scene - a symbolic cemetery of
17,000 jagged stones of various shapes and sizes spread out over an open
field, each representing a town that lost Jews and others at Treblinka.
The names of some of the locations are chiseled into the granite like
gravestones. Others remain nameless blocks. Small candles in metal
containers with Hebrew writing were frozen on the tops of several rocks,
remembrances of love for the victims at the site of a killing factory
built by hate. A large monument resembling the structures at Stonehenge
marks the site of the gas chambers.

Treblinka was empty that day. Our 10 pairs of boots crunching the frozen
ground punctuated an eerie silence. Conversation seemed out of place. For
the most part, we did not share our thoughts and emotions until long after
we had departed and thawed out from the single-digit temperatures.

The Nazis largely succeeded in demolishing most traces of their crime
scenes at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. They built farmhouses,
ploughed the land, planted trees and crops, and installed some of the
Ukrainian police guards from the death camps to take care of the "farms".

To reach Sobibor, which is southeast of Treblinka, we drove almost to the
Polish border with Belarus. An extremely high, foreboding lookout tower
silouetted against the orange, late-afternoon sky greeted us as our
bus pulled into a lot behind a brick wall with four plaques in different
languages and the word "Sobibor" stretched across the front. It was
Christmas Eve. There was a small museum that had been converted from a
kindergarten that had irreverenly been built over the site. A statue of
an agonizing women holding a child and staring toward heaven provides a
moving memorial to the quarter-of-a-million Jews and 1,000 Poles who
perished at Sobibor between 1942 and 1943. Their dust sits in a pile about
100 yards from the statue..

Sobibor's notoriety has come from its prisoner uprising. In 2001,
French filmaker Claude Lanzmann, who produced the landmark nine-hour
Holocaust documentary Shoah, debuted another film: Sobibor, October 14,
1943, 4 P.M. That was the moment when 300 Jewish prisoners killed a dozen
Nazi guards and scattered to freedom throughout the heavily wooded area
outside the barb-wire fences. Most of them were captured and shot, but
approximately 30 survived, including Yehuda Lerner, who described his
ordeal in Lanzmann's film and dispelled the myth that the Jews did nothing
to resist their executions. Shortly thereafter, the Nazis dismantled the
camp and planted trees. The rebelion also had been dramatized in the 1987
TV movie "Escape from Sobibor."

Of all the death camps in Poland, Belzec set the record for speed and
efficiency by exterminating 600,000 Jews in eight months in 1942.
Only one prisoner survived. Located on the Polish border with Ukraine,
Belzec closed because virtually all the Jews in the region had been killed.

When we visited, it was easy to see why Belzec had become known as "the
forgotten camp." The town was virtually devoid of anything that revealed
its notorious past nothing except the dilapidated train station where Jews
were unloaded from crammed freight cars, stripped, and marched to the gas
chambers. There was a sign, however, indicating that the American
Jewish Committee, the government of Poland, and the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum were raising funds to build a memorial and museum, the
first effort in 60 years to visibly remember the place where one of every
10 Jews lost in the Holocaust was murdered.

One of the most unique Holocaust memorials in the world opened at Belzec
in June, 2004. There is no lush landscaping, only gravel. Upon entering,
visitors walk down a ramp approximately 180 yards long that descends 60
feet below the ground, symbolizing the underground mass graves of the
victims. Its borders contain actual mass gravesites, which created
a controversy during the construction from groups opposed to disrupting
the area. At the lowest point, visitors literally walk into what appears
to be a dead end where there is a wall of remembrance with the names of
the victims. There is a way out, however, along a path with a cast-iron
border bearing the names of communities of the murder victims and a
timeline. There is also a place for laying memorial stones and candles.
The surface of the gravesite is covered with a layer of special sterile
soil, half a meter thick, while maintaining the original contours of the
land. From there, visitors proceed to the museum.

Our resting point following Sobibor and Belzec was Lublin (pronounced
lue-BLEEN), the largest city in Eastern Poland. As I waited for the
elevator in our hotel, a man approached me and asked why we were
there on Christmas Eve.

Before I could answer, he snarled, "It's Majdanek (pronounced my-DAN-ek),
isn't it? That's why they all come. It never happened." He rambled on
about a book by a French author that proved the Holocaust was made up.
"If some Jews were killed," he concluded, "it certainly wasn't near the
amount they claim."

I was stunned by his accusations and asked, "What about Majdanek? What
do you think went on in the gas chambers and crematorium there?" He
just walked away.

The Nazis did not try to hide their actions at Majdanek, the only death
camp built in an open, urban area. In fact, the grounds and buildings so
well-preserved that it looks as though they hurried away the night before
we arrived. Again, we were the only people at the camp, this time on a
bleak, frigid morning. It was one Christmas day I will never forget.

In the far distance from the entrance to the camp, beyond the remaining
barracks, a domed structure rising from the ground like a bubble looms
ominously on the horizon. Close up it is a chilling sight - a huge
mausoleum covering the ashes of the dead, 350,000 sufferers in a pile of
dust, roughly the population of present-day Lublin.

All the macabre tools the Germans used to kill, plunder, and burn their
victims are still there, remarkably undamaged by time. There's even
a few unused canisters left over from the eight tons of Cyxlon B gas the
Nazi guards dropped through holes in the ceilings of the gas chambers.
Several guard towers stood above the double rows of electrical wire fences
surrounding the 254-acre complex.

We first entered the rooms where they shaved the heads of the prisoners,
who were treated like raw material for the Nazis' use and as sources to
increase their personal wealth. More than 4,000 bales of human hair
(1,600 pounds) were shipped from Majdanek to companies that made the
Nazis' military clothing. The table used to extract gold and silver from
the teeth of corpses still stands in the crematorium, where some of the
ashes of the bodies were preserved to use in the camp's gardens.

We stood under the "shower heads" in the gas chambers. One person
in our group looked up in anguish and sobbed. We moved on to the
barracks, including one with bins of the former residents' shoes. The
doors to the ovens in the crematorium remain open with hand-held chutes
used to scoop slide in the bodies aimed into the furnace. Another room
displays a truck chassis used to burn the victims before the crematorium
capable of extinguishing 1,000 bodies a day was completed in 1943.

Our last stop was Auschwitz-Birkenau, the best-known symbol of the
Holocaust that received worldwide exposure earlier this year with the
commemoration of the 60th anniversary of its liberation by the Soviet Red
Army on January 27, 1945. The site of largest mass murder in human history
lies 37 miles west of Krakow, Poland's most historic city that survived
World War II unscathed because the Germans used it for their headquarters.
The festive Christmas activities in the Krakow's enormous main square (the
largest in Europe) provided an uplifting break from the camps.

There are two camps - Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau) - a little
more than a mile apart. A shuttle transports people between the two.
There's a 15-minute documentary on the liberation of the camp by the
Soviets at Auschwitz I and tours available in multiple languages.

The most photographed site is the gate at Auschwitz I where the inscription
"Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Makes [You] Free) mocked the prisoners as they
set out to labor. Approximately 1.5 million people of 27 nationalities
perished, including 1.3 million Jews, 150,000 Russians, 75,000 Poles, and
21,000 gypsies. Several of the surviving prison blocks at Auschwitz I
house exhibitions that describe the extermination, living conditions,
medical experiments of the prisoners, and other topics.

Most of the victims were gassed and burned Birkenau, an enormous 432-acre
site [more than five times the size of Auschwitz I] where nearly 100,000
prisoners were housed in 300 barracks before their executions in four
gigantic gas chambers that each could hold 2,000 victims. Electric
lifts raised the bodies to the ovens. Much of this evidence was
destroyed by the Nazis, although there remains a grayish pond where the
human ashes were dumped and remnants of the gas chambers and crematorium.
Some of the barracks are open to the public. The vastness of Birkenau
leaves a lasting impression of the enormity of the Nazis' crimes against
humanity.

It became obvious at Auschwitz-Birkenau why Halperin exposed our group to
the other four camps in the dead of winter where the solitude and serenity
magnified the impact immensely. At Auschwitz, some wandered off alone to
contemplate how the Nazis could possibly have killed eight thousand
people a day while other visitors chatted on their cell phones.

More than 25 million people from around the world have visited
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Since the early 1990s, more than 500,000 - half of
them Poles, most of them young people - have come to sites each year.

Of all the messages I saw on signs and memorials at the camps, one has
been indelibly embedded in my memory. An inscription on a rock in front
of the mausoleum at Majdanek alerts visitors: "Let our fate be your
warning." Unfortunately, the world has not paid attention.

When you debate whether you should expose yourself or your families to
the death camps of Poland, think of what the world is like now and what
it could become if future generations see Majdanek and heed its warning.