Today was a very hard day for me, Dr. Chapman and the students. We journeyed from Warsaw to the site of the extermination camp Chełmno. We were very much in the middle of nowhere, and spent much of the day en route with very little to eat. We arrived in Łodź “hangry” as Melonie likes to say—-with major low blood sugar, a tired and agitated group.
Chełmno is hard to fathom. It was the first extermination camp where around 300,000 Jews (and some Roma) were killed. Today about 30,000 tourists a year visit the site—not so easy a task. But the director told me some only visit the small museum while others go to the actual site of the burial pits some 4 kilometers away. We see only two women on bicycles, locals it would seem. We are alone with each other on the vast expanse of what was. And there is little there to reflect the horror of what happened—-where Jews were gassed in vans as they were driven to the site where they were first buried and later exhumed and burned. The desolation makes the experience so profound, especially since we know the Nazi ruse of “resettlement” did not last long at sites like Chełmno and Treblinka where people were beaten and tortured almost from the moment they arrived. Chełmno feels like a forgotten place, but one where the earth still screams in pain. The few “poppies” growing on the site attest that Chełmno has been largely forgotten; the poppy itself a symbol of death (most often associate with World War I) doesn’t grow here in large numbers but rather like everything else on the landscape is sparse. I read that a baby’s remains was found a few years ago near the museum site and buried in a small grave near the memorial. The sign I read said the baby must have been hidden at the time. But how many babies, children and pregnant women died here? Taking my students to Chełno is important to me. I’m proud they made the journey because the victims at who died here must be remembered.
On site at Chełmno is a ring of tombstones. They aren’t original. They were found elsewhere, having been moved by the Germans and used now at Chełmno as a sort of make-shift memorial. One has a domestic scene on it that I think is unusual, but I can’t find a good description to explain the iconography. It contains a “pitcher” so a reference to ritual washing, but since it looks like a kitchen scene, I’m supposing it is the grave marker of a woman. It reminds me that Jews were taken from their homes—-the sites of their daily lives—-and removed to horror on a barren and hidden landscape where their identities were stripped from them before they were murdered.
Near the end of the day we saw the Radegast train station in Łodź from which so many Jews were deported. The memorial is extremely well done with a railroad track running along the ceiling, and a real rail line close by—-making for eery moments when a train goes by.
