Photos from Belzec

	Until just a few years ago, there was nothing at Belzec: no museum, no monument--just an open field filled with ash and bone fragments. The town of Belzec is about forty-five minutes away from Lublin, but it seem like another planet from Lublin. Belzec is a very small, very poor little village. But in the last few years, the city of Lublin has invested a huge amount of money into creating a state of the art museum facility there with one of the largest monuments in Poland. This is the sign outside the main gate to Belzec. The rusting, dripping effect, I suspect, was part of the designer's plan when he designed the monument at Belzec. Belzec is easily the most forgotten of the death camps, thanks in part to the fact that only four people survived it (and two of them did not survive the war). In contrast, because of its nature as a transit, concentration, and labor camp in addition to a death camp, Auschwitz had over 60,000 survivors. Belzec was strictly a death camp. It had a skeleton crew of 500 Jews who were charged with digging mass graves and burying the recently gassed Jews. After a few weeks, the entire Sonderkommand of Belzec would be replaced with a fresh load of Jews, after the former commando was gassed.




	In its new facility, Belzec has one of the best and most informative walking tours of any of the museums in Poland. This is a small display of some of the shoes found when the site was excavated after the war. When the Nazis closed Belzec in 1943, they razed every trace of the camp to the ground. They planted trees and built a farmhouse, where they placed a local family. If questioned, the family was instructed to lie and say that the farm had been in their family for years.
	This is the remnant of the apparatus used to funnel the exhaust gas from the massive diesel engine into the gas chamber. Belzec, like Treblinka, and Sobibor (the other "Operation Reinhard" camps of death) all used carbon monoxide from diesel exhaust to kill their victims. One of the two survivors of Belzec was Rudolf Reder, whose job it was to work on the diesel engine.
	This is one of many student art exhibits that is on display in Belzec.
	The students were awarded prizes for their work, which they created after attending the workshops in the new student learning facilities.
	A remarkable piece of art by a young Polish student.
	This is a wire sculpture that own the overall prize for best piece in the exhibit.
	Though this looks like a bad picture, it is, in fact, the most striking part of Belzec. In the back of the Museum, down a ramp is a solitary, open door. When you enter this door, you find yourself in an immense, black space. The only light comes from the exit sign and the ambient light of the museum beyond. To the left is the 8 feet by 10 feet, old monument that was erected at Belzec after the war, attesting in Polish to the victims of "fascism". The room is easily ten meters high, twenty-five meters wide, and a hundred meters long. The walls are poured concrete. The walls, ceiling, and floor itself have no features whatsoever. As Wladek and I walked deeper into the darkness, I could feel the growing darkness around me. When I reached the end of the room, I could barely see anything at all. I faced a solid, black wall. I stood there, dejected, and swallowed by the enormity of the darkness. This was the most moving and significant part of my entire trip, for it was here in this room that I actually came close to feeling the Holocaust in its enormity.
	This a view of the new monument at Belzec from the museum entrance. The monument itself is massive, covering many acres. It consists of an elevating field of cinders and igneous rock formations, with a walkway cut through the middle, leading to the back of the memorial. Around the perimeter are plaques with the names of every Polish city, by year, who had their Jews deported to Belzec.
	This is a shot of what the grounds were like before the new monument was erected. You can still see some of the cinders and ash that littered the open field.
	Here, you can see some of the name plates that line the perimeter. Like the entry sign, these names are rusting.
	This is a view to the left of the main entrance to the monument itself. This central area was made of a strange material that felt spongy to the touch.
	A close-up of one of the name plates. As with most cites related to the holocaust throughout Europe, the Hebrew equivalent is also given for place names.
	This is the path leading through the monument. On both sides, you are flanked by this massive cinder field. As you progress through the heart of the monument, the cinder field begins to rise around you so that by the end, you fell completely swallowed by the monument itself.
	A view from halfway down the pathway.
	At the end of the pathway is an opening with this inscription. It is here that mourners leave their candles and wreathes. Two staircases flank either side of this area leading one back around the monument.
	This is a view from the top of the monument, looking back towards the entrance over the cinder field.
	This is looking back down the staircase at the back of Belzec.
	These are the trees behind the monument. Unlike Auschwitz, these trees were quite thick, and easily concealed what was occurring inside this camp, though, again, the smell of the dead could be smelled for miles.
	I felt a special connection with this city because we actually traveled through it and had lunch in the centrum on our way to Belzec. Zamosc was one of the first cities in Poland to have a significant Jewish population. This indicates that this name plate marks the fourth transport from Zamosc in 1942.
	This is the undeveloped are to the left of the Belzec camp site. I suspect that this ground will be used for further development.
	This was the latest display at Belzec. Near the entrance to the camp, they have stacked some of the original rail ties they have unearthed during their creation of the new site here.

	This is a close-up of the rail ties, crisscrossed with iron rail beams.
	A side view of the cracked and almost petrified rail ties.
	This is the rail line that runs parallel to Belzec, from which the rail spur ran. Though Belzec is now a state-of-the-art facility, it remains largely forgotten. We spent half a day touring Belzec and the entire time, we were the only ones there. In the parking lot there was Wladek's car and the car of the receptionist. The house the Nazis built still stands at the entrance to the camp, just over the rail line. There is one road leading through Belzec, and the camp itself was only twenty-five meters from this road.