I wanted to see Lublin before I left Poland. I needed to go back to Warsaw, to something familiar, to regroup after my experiences in Krakow. The weekend in Warsaw, now my second time in Warsaw, was uneventful.  It’s an easy city to navigate. I know where to eat and where to chill.  I know that the bar and dance club scene kinda sucks on weekends. I know the drivers are crazy aggressive.  I booked my train to Lublin and my hostel there. I planned the bus route to visit Zamosc and Jozefow from Lublin and use Lublin as a base.  Zamosc is a very famous beautiful city but I did not know until after I planning that my family had an important connection to this city.

While this Poland experience was happening, I was very inspired to collect and review notes from the past and to reach out to family abroad. I learned I had a second cousin Yariv when I was in Samoa. Yariv sent me the Youtube video links of our great-aunt Sonia Stern’s survivor testimony recorded by him.   He told me he wanted to translate it using some crazy audio technology but I just went ahead and hired my own translator anyway.  I’m quite glad I did. I hit it off really well with the translator and he became very engaged in the story, wanting to ensure that every location he was translating was a real place (using Google Maps). As the translation was coming in, I was bus-ing and train-ing around Poland and learning incredible things about my family history. I had read before my trip that Jozefow was named after Tomas Josef Zamoyski, one of the inheritors of the Zamoyski Ordynacki.  Jan Zamoyski, the founder, was one of the most powerful and influential leaders of 16th century Poland. The town of Zamosc was named after the family. From the testimony translation, I learned that my great-uncle Ruvym Graf had an apartment and a store in Zamosc. I would learn even later that ss the family fled Jozefow and began to head east, they brought all of their possessions that survived the fire to the store and locked the door.  I knew I absolutely had to visit Zamosc now.

Arriving in Lublin was incredibly moving for me.  While Grandpa had already returned to his region of Poland in 1999 and broken through that insane barrier of visiting a place where his people were kicked out, no one had visited the Graf ancestral town.  What we know from family lore is that the Grafs of Jozefow are really, really from Jozefow, as in they all lived there for hundreds of years. They were hat makers, shoemakers (shoe leather) and perhaps tailors.  Lublin is the capital of the Lublin province. It’s the entry point. It’s the province where the Grafs are from. It’s also probably the most backwards of the Polish provinces (they are called wojewozwo). Highways do not exist.  The train track is a single track, no two-way traffic here. The bus system is quite elaborate though. The local bus stations have even larger parking lots with minibuses and shuttles that take you all over the region all times of the day.  These little buses would be my saving grace. I don’t think I took an official bus at all in this region, it was all private minibuses where you pay the driver and he mumbles something and you have no idea what he said.

The hostel said to wait for bus #3 at the train station.  Google Maps said it would be a 30 minute walk to the old town.  The buses in Lublin have digital signs telling you when the next bus is coming.  Bus #3 wouldn’t be coming for a while. I proceeded to walk through the new town.   I crossed some poorly paved roads and confusing traffic circles. Eventually, I came across stuff that started looking older.  I got to the old town and saw the gate that leads to the old city. It really creeped me out. The accordion player under the gate was playing Hava Nagila.  Did he even know what he was playing?

I checked into the hostel.  I had read some reviews about hostels in this region.  I knew there would be less English. I did not think that, generally, the people would be less friendly.  At point point I was able to analyze this situation as them just being embarrassed that they don’t speak English that well.  Still, I’ll never really know what the deal is with the attitude. The worker at the Lublin hostel was a total dickface. I had arrived before official checkin time and usually they let you just drop your bags off and pay and give you a key so later on, you don’t have to pay.  This guy was clearly stressed out that he had to clean a whole bunch of beds before 3pm and said to me with some attitude that he doesn’t have time to check me in right now. There was no room for dropping off bags, he just told me to put my stuff on the floor in the corner. I obliged and left immediately so I could explore the city. 

I walked around the immediate area of the old city gate.  The architecture was beautiful. There was some new plaza the EU had paid for.  Lots of children playing in the water. I saw some old synagogue on Google Maps but the pictures just looked sad.  I had read something about the Jewish Quarter of Lublin and how it was destroyed, like all of the other Jewish Quarters, so I was naturally curious as to where it was.  I decided to walk through the old town. It is probably the most picturesque, authentic and charming old town I have seen in a European city. The view of the valley and the Lublin castle are marvelous.  As you descend through the old town, you reach a gate and further head downhill to a large circular plaza that serves as a parking lot. There are pretty buildings around the parking lot though. In one direction, you can cross a bridge and climb up lots of pretty stairs to get to Lublin castle.  Then there is a park. If you continue through the circular parking lot, you get to a main avenue that marks the edge of the city. This road leads to Majdanek and other adjacent towns. The main bus station is here. I had see the entire town in less than two hours. I wasn’t sure what to do next.  I looked up how to get to Majdanek from the main bus station. The Majdanek web site said there should one that leaves from there but whoa… the bus shelter was packed with people in both directions and they must have recently changed the local bus numbering system because they bus they mention was nowhere on the giant list of buses.

I figured I could walk back through the old town, it was so lovely, and go to the bus stop by the main gate where maybe it would be easier to find the right bus.  This ended up working out but whoa this was complicated. As the bus went down the road, I started remembering a lot of the data I had read about Majdanek all of these years.  I remembered how it was one of the only concentration camps the Nazis did not make any attempts to hide. Just then, the bus started approaching what could only be recognized as a concentration camp.  It’s just right there. In the distance you see the rows and columns of barracks. You see the giant memorial the Polish built. There’s a welcome center and small museum at the edge. The bus pulls over and you are literally right outside of a concentration camp.  The bus stop is called “Majdanek”. This just feels so raw to me. In Germany, all of these sites are called Gedenkstatte or memorials. Just having a little prefix to the word helps remind you that this site was a death camp but is currently a memorial.  I think this would serve the Polish well. 

You have to walk all the way to the end of the site to the welcome center to enter.  It’s quite a bit of a walk from the bus stop, even though you could hop the little fence and just start your experience at the monument that’s alongside the road.  I ended up hopping the fence on my way back to catch the bus. No need to go through the parking lot.

It was a hot afternoon.  Families were there with strollers and children.  I did not understand why. These kids were way too young to be learning about the Holocaust.  I heard the families speaking Polish. So these were locals. What the hell was going on? One of the first buildings you enter is the famous gas chamber, which is mostly preserved.  It is so preserved that the blue streaks from the Zyklon-B gas still stain the walls. There is a single memorial candle inside. There is some basic signage letting you know you are entering the gas chamber, of course starting with the clothes changing area.  Just as I was about to have a moment of contemplation, I hear a bunch of older French men having a full volume conversation about nothing right outside the gas chamber. I thought, I really hope they stop talking when they come in here. Unfortunately, they just continued to yap, yap, yap.  They must have missed the sign that this was a gas chamber. I gave them a few seconds to realize where they were but they wouldn’t stop yapping. I had to interrupt. It’s just so inappropriate. I thought to myself, if I’m traveling from another part of the world to pay my respect to the innocent who lost their lives in these horrible places like Auschwitz and Majdanek, then it is absolutely ok for me to remind people that these are memorial sites and they should not disturb the peace of others looking to pay respects.  I interrupted the conversation, in French. I said, “Excuse, this is a cemetery.” They stopped talking immediately and left the room. Should I have said something different? Should I have been nicer? I don’t know what the “should haves” are in a concentration camp memorial. I don’t know why people come to visit these places without understanding the context and without knowing enough beforehand to arrive with a sense of respect.

Other barracks in Majdanek have exhibitions explaining everything from how the camp was built to what happened in Lublin and how the camp was partially dismantled as the Russian liberators approached.  Also running in-and-out of the barracks where the children visiting with their parents treating the site like it was a playground. I waited for the children and family to run out and pass me significantly before continuing my experience.  I did not want to have to tell them it was a cemetery as well.

When I entered the room with the piles of shoes, I lost it.  It’s too graphic. It’s too sad. The shoes are from real people.  You can see they are worn. You can see some of the shoelaces. My family was shoemakers.  It’s so awful. I left that room crying. People walking by me (there weren’t too many people there) saw me crying.  No one else really seemed upset by anything. No one else really seemed moved by what was on display. I found this emotional detachment incredibly disturbing and frustrating.  With the children running around and careless parents using Majdanek like it was a walk in the park, I was quickly reminded of how I felt in Krakow and how I really do not belong here.  This place is not for me. It is not for Jews.

I went through the entire site.  I arrived at the rear of the site where a massive concrete elliptical memorial was built housing the mounds of ashes that were found when the camp was liberated.  They did not know what to do with all of the ashes. They put it in a big concrete chamber. They created a concrete walking path around it. You can look down into the chamber and see the mound.  Sitting along the edge of the wall were quite a few groups of friends and families socializing, chatting, catching up -- all in Polish. My first reaction was that this is not the right place for that.  This is the graveyard and it is for paying respect. I said the Kaddish here. Some people overheard me and stopped sitting on the ledge. I’m sure they felt somewhat weird. My second set of thoughts was a little more “progressive”.  I thought that if locals use Majdanek as a place to talk about their life and as a social gathering point, maybe that’s a way to bring life into a very sad place. Maybe that’s the only way they can live with having an awful death camp in their backyard; one that they have to drive by probably daily as they go into and out of Lublin.  To me, it is still a graveyard. Maybe to the locals, it really is just a park where some terribly sad things happened, but they personally had nothing to do with it and they do not know any Jews or surviving Jewish families so there is nothing to be sad about. It’s just foreign to them, I guess.

I learned in the Majdanek barracks that the parking lot that I walked through at the end of the Lublin old town was the Jewish Quarter, with the entry gate known as The Grodzka Gate.  The Nazis completely leveled it the Jewish Quarter.  The Russians then paved over it and made half of it a parking lot and the other half a park.  That’s why it appears out of nowhere, a very dense old town and suddenly a flat parking lot. That was the market hub of old town Lublin.  I also learned that the Lublin Jewish Quarter was rather poor and resembled a shanty town. Generations of houses built one on top of another.  Shoddy building construction, probably not the cleanest of neighborhoods. It was one of the excuses the Nazis used to plow it down besides their goal of eradicating Jews from the history of Europe.  In this case, they really did succeed. They wiped Jews off the map of Lublin.

I went back to the hostel pretty shocked and sad.  I knew that it was best to just get some ice cream and probably call it a night.  I did find a good restaurant that night and had a few beers. Unfortunately, the hostel faced the street, across from a cafe that doubled as a night club.  The nightclub, on a Tuesday night, was blasting music with drunk 20 year olds screaming, actually screaming, outside until about 5:30am. Needless to say, I did not sleep.  I found it comical that Lublin, out of all of the cities in my travels, had the craziest party scene such that the town had no ordinances to against things like this. At least the hostel could have warned us so that I could have changed rooms.  I would learn there was another single bedroom that faced the alleyway and I changed rooms promptly the next night.