WJU Students and Classrooms without Borders: Lublin

Our third installment was written by Jason Totty, class of '14.

Old Town Lublin

  On the second leg of the Classrooms without Border’s Holocaust study seminar, the group visited Lublin, Poland's ninth largest city. Lublin possessed the city center of a traditional medieval city, as evidenced by the two city gates that surrounded the square. The age of this city was evidenced in its Baroque architecture. Unlike most cities, which suffered heavily at the hands of Blitzkrieg and the subsequent Nazi occupation, the old town of Lublin remained relatively unscathed. The medieval flare and its unique Holocaust history made for a worthwhile experience and attraction.


  We arrived at Lublin in late morning after a sleepy bus ride from Warsaw. The architectural achievements of the city were the first historical aspects presented to teachers and students. Sitting atop a hill facing the parking lot where we emptied our bus, was the famous Lublin castle.The castle overlooked the old town, as well modern Lublin. Another significant architectural site was the famous Krakow Gate, one of the city's original entry points that travelers coming from the direction of Krakow would pass through on their way to the Lublin.

Lublin Castle

 

Krakow Gate

  Lublin was an extremely significant city to the Holocaust. Odilo Globocnik, the Higher SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district, ordered the construction of the Belzec extermination camp in October 1941, and he later spearheaded Operation Reinhard, the German program to murder the General Government's Jews. While a large number of Lublin's Jews were murdered at Belzec, the majority -- some 26,000 -- were sent to the local concentration/extermination camp Majdanek and killed.

Grodzka Gate Theater

  One of the difficult aspects of studying the Holocaust is looking at and remembering the persecuted population  as individual people and not just faceless numbers. This is especially difficult in the case of Lublin where the Jewish quarter of the city was destroyed by the Germans following the murder of its population and it is now covered by a parking lot -- the very same one that our bus parked in. The Grodzka Gate, which served as the link between the Polish and Jewish sections of the old city, now functions as a both a theatre and memorial museum and archive, dedicated to remember pre-war Jewish life in Lublin.  

  The archives contain numerous interviews and statements from witnesses to pre-war Jewish life, as well as from survivors. There are film rolls of Jewish families (pictures) along with documents and accounts of Lublin’s Jewish population. This attempt at preserving history and educating others keeps Holocaust accounts focused on individuals instead of statistics. It is an excellent example of a grass-roots campaign to rescue the history of Lublin's Jews.