It’s impossible in these few words to describe what it feels like to walk through Majdanek, outside Lublin Poland, but it is a feeling powerful and creepy and overwhelmingly sad.
The second largest of the Nazi concentration camps, Majdanek (pronounced
My-DAN-ek) was the site of 250,000 deaths in a little more than two years in 1943 and 1944 during the bloodiest period of World War II.
It was also the site of the worst single day massacre of all the death camps, when the Nazis woke up one November morning and proceeded to kill 18,000 people by sundown.
I walked through the gas chambers, in a building ridiculously labeled “Bath and Disinfectant.”
I walked through the barracks with a memorial containing thousands and thousands of shoes taken from prisoners.
I saw the ovens where the bodies were burned and the memorial over the mound of ashes of 100,000 people, roughly the population of every man, woman and child in the City of Erie.
It is this past, along with forty years of Soviet occupation, which scars the soul of Poland.
“You Americans are always so happy,” one waitress in Lublin told us, “and my people are so sad.”
But there is a new hope for Poland and it can be found in her children.
With the ceremonial last Soviet soldier leaving Poland in the early 1990’s, the first generation of Poles born into freedom is now college age, and they are going to University in droves.
They are bright, and they are determined, and they realize as a group that they bear the weight of the sacrifices of their parents and grandparents on their young shoulders.
Most of them speak English as a second language and most of them dress as if they just walked out of a fashion magazine ad.
And many of them are frustrated at power structures still stuck in an authoritarian past and an economy that is not growing fast enough to give them the level playing field they deserve.
But it’s coming, and so are they.
From what I’ve seen, we will underestimate them at our own peril in the years to come.