Nazi Death Camps and C.S. Lewis

Emily, Me and Cliff

Since 2017, I have visited sixteen different Nazi death camps in Germany, Poland, Czechia and France.  A few of them twice.  I have also visited Holocaust memorials including Yad Vashem and the Deportation Memorial in Paris on the same island as Notre Dame Cathedral.  Since 1977, I have read all the works of C.S. Lewis, many of them several times.  When I visited death camps, it is with a mind very much formed by Lewis’s view of the world.  Lewis did not write about the camps or the Holocaust, but he has given me the ability to tour the camps and learn the details of the torture and murder committed in these places and maintain my sanity. 

The three books in particular are in the back of my mind if not in conscious thought when I visit Nazi death camps. They are The Four Loves, The Great Divorce, and The Screwtape Letters. The first death camp I visited was Auschwitz-Birkenau.  In 2017, I rode a bicycle to the city of Oswiecim from Belgrade the continued on to Lviv, Ukraine. I learned from reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder that Auschwitz was the center of industrial murder of Jews. Lviv was the place where the Nazis did almost nothing. Residents of the city raped, robbed and murdered all the Jews in the city and disposed of the bodies.  My intention was to see the worst sites of the Holocaust. Then I flew to Israel and visited Yad Vashem.  I returned to Europe and spent a week with my best friend. He and I were roommates in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in the Cold War US military in the late 1970s.  I left the Army and went to college. Sgt Cliff Almes upon discharge joined the land of Kanaan Lutheran monastery in Darmstadt and became Bruder Timotheus. 

In the years since my first visits in 2017,  Cliff and I visited death camps together.  It was wrenching to go alone, but with Cliff, we could discuss what we saw afterwards.  In The Four Loves Lewis says the posture of friendship is side-by-side, sharing the same journey.  Cliff and I went to a dozen death camps together and also spent a week in Israel. Lewis says facing a hard task together is much better than facing it alone. (He also says shirking is best done with companions.) On our most recent journey Cliff and I were joined by a mutual friend who was deployed to Poland and got a four-day pass to join us.  I taught ESL with Emily a decade ago in Lancaster. She visited Kanaan in 2019. In 2020 she joined the Army and became a combat medic. She was running a medic team in Poland.  The three of us went to the Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno and Majdanek death camps.  A pair of friends can always be joined by another.

Every death camp different. Many people asked me why go to so many death camps? Because each death camp is unique. While the ultimate goal was death to the Jewish people and all deemed unfit to live by the Nazis, each camp was run differently.  In Auschwitz-Birkenau more than a million Jews from all over Europe were murdered: gassed or worked to death. It was also a huge slave labor camp.  Some inmates lived more than a year and survived their terrible confinement. Treblinka, by contrast, was death machine.  Trains ran back and forth from Warsaw to Treblinka.  Those on the train were murdered on arrival, and another train rolled in. More than 800,000 were murdered in just two years. Another contrast in these camps: Treblinka was hidden from view in a remote forest.  Auschwitz is right in the city of Oswiecim. One of the strangest things about visiting Auschwitz is hearing the church bells.  The Catholic Church is adjacent to the camp.

The camps were all run by human beings.  As I see the barracks, the gas chambers, the cremation ovens, the kitchens, the latrines, the guard towers, the work rooms, I see places that were run by men and women who had eternal souls.  The people who ran the camps were not another species of evil beings, they were no different from us in substance, just different in the way they chose to live their lives.  I am aware that choice is limited in a totalitarian regime, but there was resistance.  German police were mobilized in thousands to murder Jews with gunshots and shove them into mass graves.  Some few refused. They were allowed other duties. Lewis made clear there are no ordinary persons. We are all eternal. Including murderers of innocents. Someday they will join the queue for the tour bus.  If they board they will travel to the edge of Heaven and a victim of their crimes will make the long journey to offer them forgiveness.  How many will heed that offer?

Which brings me to the bespeckled embodiment of Nazi evil. A failed Austrian salesman with a talent for logistics who joined the Nazi Party in Germany soon after Adolph Hitler took power because he needed a job.  Adolph Eichmann became a Nazi official and by 1935 was organizing the deportation of Jews from the Reich. In an irony of obeying orders, Eichmann saved the lives of thousands of Jews by deporting them.  Many Jews wanted to leave but could not navigate the approvals necessary. Eichmann organized a large arena where all the agencies were under one roof, completing all the paperwork in a day or two.  The Jews he processed lost all their property but escaped with their lives. 

 When the Nazis invaded Poland, Eichmann was on hold for two years from late 1939 until early 1942 when the Final Solution became Nazi policy.  The same Eichmann who got Jews out of the Reich used his same logistic skill to round up Jews and send them to death camps. Eichmann took three million Jews from their homes and sent them to death camps.  He was efficient and thoughtless.  Screwtape, the mid-level bureaucrat in the lowerarchy of Hell does what his Father Below orders.  As I visit camps, I look at the rail sidings, the offices, the barracks, and feel the presence of clerks doing their jobs. Reading and rereading The Screwtape Letters I was amused by the wit that assembled these advice letters to Wormwood.  But the evil hovers there.  Eichmann was a small and vain man. When he did his job well he bragged and expected praise.  He would fit perfectly within Screwtape’s world. 

My friends Bruder Timotheus and Sergeant Emily Burgett are with me at Belsen, Treblinka, Buchenwald and all the other camps helping me to navigate the near-infinite evil of these camps. And C.S. Lewis is there also.

 

Carl Lutz, Visas for Life, and Eric Saul

Eric Saul (tall man in the middle) at Arch Street Friends Meeting House

At the end of March I went to a presentation titled:

Visas For Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats

held at the Arch Street Friends Meeting House.  The event focused on Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat in Budapest who rescued 62,000 Jews from the Holocaust. At the center of research and publication of work about Lutz and other diplomats who rescued Jews is Eric Saul, one of the speakers at the event.

I was not aware that anyone had rescued that many Jews from Hitler and his horrible minions.  And I think of Budapest as one of the worst sites in the tragedy of that is The Holocaust.  In just a few months in the middle of 1944, more than 400,000 Jews were deported from Budapest to Auschwitz and other death camps.  Adolph Eichmann reached his peak of evil efficiency in Budapest in 1944.  It was happily stunning to find that an epic rescue was going on at the same. 

I will be writing more about this program and about Saul later in the year.  At this time of the year when the world marks the end of the Holocaust and of World War II in Europe, I was delighted to learn about a heroic action I had not previously been aware of.  

 

Sachsenhausen Nazi Death Camp.

Sachsenhausen occupies a grim but central place in the Nazi camp system. Located just north of Berlin near the town of Oranienburg, it was established in 1936 as a model concentration camp—designed not only to imprison enemies of the regime but to demonstrate how the entire terror apparatus was meant to function. Unlike Auschwitz or Treblinka, Sachsenhausen was not primarily built as a mass extermination center, but it became a central node in the machinery of murder, forced labor, and bureaucratic control that made the Holocaust possible.

Because of its proximity to Berlin, Sachsenhausen took on a special role. It housed many political prisoners, resistance figures, and high-profile detainees, including German dissidents, foreign politicians, clergy, and later Allied prisoners of war. Just as important, it was the administrative and training hub for the SS-run camp system. The SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps was headquartered nearby, and Sachsenhausen became the place where guards were trained and procedures standardized. What was learned here—how to break prisoners, how to organize forced labor, how to manage mass death—was exported to camps across occupied Europe.

Sachsenhausen was also a killing site in its own right. Tens of thousands of prisoners died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, beatings, and execution. In 1941, the camp was used to murder at least 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, many shot in a specially constructed execution facility known as Station Z. Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others deemed “undesirable” were imprisoned and killed here. While it did not have the industrialized gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen had gas vans, shooting installations, and crematoria designed to process bodies efficiently.

The camp’s layout itself reflected Nazi ideology. Prisoners’ barracks were arranged in a fan shape around a central parade ground, allowing guards in a single watchtower to survey the entire compound. This was not accidental. Sachsenhausen was built as a demonstration of how surveillance, discipline, and terror could be made architectural. The prisoner was never meant to escape being seen—or being controlled.

Sachsenhausen’s role in the broader death-camp system was therefore structural as well as lethal. If Auschwitz was the industrial heart of genocide, Sachsenhausen was part of its brain. Procedures for registration, punishment, labor deployment, and extermination were refined here before being implemented elsewhere. The men who ran Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz often trained in or passed through Sachsenhausen.

When Allied forces closed in during 1945, tens of thousands of Sachsenhausen prisoners were forced on death marches westward; many died along the roads. Those left behind were liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. The site later became a Soviet special camp, where thousands more prisoners died, adding another tragic layer to its history.

Sachsenhausen is the place where bureaucratic murder was organized, tested, and perfected—a reminder that genocide does not begin with gas chambers, but with offices, training programs, and men who learn how to make cruelty efficient.

 

The Majdanek Nazi Death Camp--Horror in Plain Sight

 

Majdanek was unlike any of the other death camps we visited on this trip. The others were hidden in the woods, operating in secret.  This camp, built on the outskirts of Lublin—so close to the city that streetcars once ran within sight of its fences—was never hidden. The chimneys of its crematoria, the rows of barracks, the watchtowers, all stood in plain view of civilians. Unlike Sobibór or Treblinka, where almost nothing remains, Majdanek endures as one of the most complete and chilling physical testimonies of the Holocaust.

Construction began in October 1941, originally as a prisoner-of-war camp for captured Soviet soldiers. But by 1942, under Operation Reinhard, Majdanek was expanded into a full-scale concentration and extermination center. It became both a labor and death camp—part of the machinery of genocide that included Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Jews, Poles, Soviet POWs, and political prisoners from across occupied Europe were imprisoned here. Estimates of the dead vary, but at least 78,000 people—about 60,000 of them Jews—were murdered at Majdanek between 1941 and 1944.

The camp covered nearly 700 acres, divided into six large prisoner fields surrounded by double barbed-wire fences and dozens of guard towers. Within those fences stood barracks built for 50 but often crammed with hundreds, their wooden walls soaked with lice, disease, and despair. Prisoners were forced into brutal labor—building roads, sorting belongings from the murdered, maintaining the camp itself. For many, starvation, exposure, or random execution preceded the gas chambers.

Majdanek’s gas chambers still stand today. They were small, primitive structures with steel doors and blue stains left by Zyklon B pellets. Nearby is the crematorium, where bodies were burned on open grates or in brick ovens. When the Soviets liberated Majdanek in July 1944, they found everything largely intact—records, canisters of gas, mountains of shoes, and thousands of unburned corpses. The Nazis had not had time to destroy the evidence. It was the first major camp liberated, and the world saw immediately what the Germans had done. Soviet journalists and Allied investigators documented the site within days; photographs of the crematoria shocked even those already aware of Nazi atrocities.

The most horrific single event at Majdanek was “Operation Harvest Festival” (Erntefest), on November 3, 1943. In a single day, 18,000 Jews were shot in trenches outside the barracks to the sound of loudspeakers playing music to drown out the gunfire. It was the largest single-day massacre of Jews during the entire Holocaust.

Today, Majdanek remains almost eerily preserved. The barbed wire still coils along the perimeter, and the long rows of barracks line up against the Lublin skyline. At the far end of the camp stands a vast concrete mausoleum containing the ashes of victims—gray, powdery, and exposed beneath a dome that reads: “Let our fate be a warning to you.”

Unlike the hidden forest camps, Majdanek confronts the visitor directly. It is not a place reclaimed by silence, but one where the machinery of death remains visible—rusted, weathered, and undeniable. Its proximity to the living city of Lublin serves as both accusation and memorial: a reminder that genocide can unfold not in remote secrecy, but in plain sight.

The Sobibor Nazi Death Camp

Sobibór, deep in the forests of eastern Poland near the Bug River, was one of the most secret and lethal of the Nazi death camps. Built in the spring of 1942 as part of Operation Reinhard—the codename for the systematic extermination of Polish Jewry—it functioned solely for mass murder. Between April 1942 and October 1943, an estimated 250,000 Jews were killed there, most from Poland, and others from the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and France. Unlike Auschwitz, Sobibór had no vast complex or barracks for slave labor. It existed for one purpose: to kill as efficiently and invisibly as possible.

The camp was divided into three sections. Camp I held the SS staff quarters and workshops; Camp II served as a reception and sorting area for those arriving by train; Camp III—surrounded by tall fences and thick forest—contained the gas chambers and mass graves. Victims were transported in sealed freight cars that arrived directly at a small rail spur leading into the camp. Deceived into believing they had reached a transit station for “resettlement in the East,” deportees were forced to undress in a so-called “undressing yard.” 

Men, women, and children were then driven down a fenced and camouflaged path cynically called the Schlauch (“tube”)—a narrow, 150-meter corridor leading straight to the gas chambers. There, carbon monoxide from an engine killed hundreds at a time. Their bodies were first buried in mass pits, later exhumed and burned on open pyres to erase evidence.

In October 1943, the prisoners staged one of the most remarkable revolts of the Holocaust. Led by a group of Jewish inmates that included Soviet POW Alexander Pechersky and Polish Jew Leon Feldhendler, the plan was both desperate and daring. They secretly armed themselves, lured SS officers into workshops and killed them quietly, and then cut through the perimeter fences. When the alarm sounded, hundreds of prisoners made a mad dash across the minefields and into the woods. About 300 escaped, though most were recaptured or killed. Fewer than 50 ultimately survived the war.

After the uprising, Heinrich Himmler ordered Sobibór dismantled. The gas chambers were torn down, the ground plowed over, and trees planted to disguise the site. Only faint traces remained—railway embankments, bits of concrete, scattered bones in the sandy soil. For decades, Sobibór seemed to vanish into silence.

Today, that silence has been reclaimed as sacred ground. The entire area where the murders and burials took place is now blanketed with thousands of white stones—a sea of pale, uneven rock that both shields and reveals. The stones make it impossible to walk casually over the killing fields. They serve instead as a physical barrier between the living and the dead, a quiet admonition never to tread on the graves. Seen from above, the stones gleam like bleached bones, marking the outline of a place where civilization broke apart.

At Sobibór there are no buildings to tour, only absence and the memory of what happened there. The forest presses close again, as it did in 1942, but the stones ensure that this time, nothing is hidden. 

The Treblinka Nazi Death Camp

 

After visiting the Chelmno Death Camp, Emily and Cliff and I drove to the Treblinka Death Camp, located about 80 kilometers northeast of Warsaw.  Treblinka was one of the most efficient killing centers of the Holocaust—second only to Auschwitz in the number of victims murdered. Established in July 1942 as part of Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan to annihilate the Jews of occupied Poland, Treblinka’s purpose was extermination. 

It was not a concentration camp or labor site. Within just over a year of operation, between 870,000 and 925,000 Jews—mostly from the Warsaw Ghetto and the surrounding districts—were murdered there, along with several thousand Roma and Polish prisoners.

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We began our visit at 9am. As we parked, four tour buses rolled in with almost 200 Israeli high school students touring Treblinka. Israel sends student groups to death camps to see this terrible history. 

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The camp was divided into two main sections: Treblinka I, a small forced-labor camp opened in 1941 to supply gravel to local rail projects, and Treblinka II, the death camp built in 1942. The latter was hidden in dense forest near the Bug River, chosen for its isolation and proximity to rail lines that could bring victims from across the urban areas. 

The deportation trains, operated with chilling precision by the Reich Main Security Office under Adolf Eichmann’s logistical oversight, arrived daily—often carrying up to 6,000 people each. Most transports came from the Warsaw Ghetto during its liquidation in the summer of 1942, but many also came from Białystok, Radom, Lublin, and even from Austria, Greece, and Czechoslovakia.

Upon arrival, victims were told they had reached a transit station for “resettlement in the East.” After being forced to undress, they were driven through a fenced, camouflaged pathway cynically nicknamed “the Road to Heaven” (Himmelstrasse) leading to the gas chambers. 

The chambers—first three, later expanded to ten—were disguised as showers. Diesel exhaust was pumped in until all inside were dead, usually within twenty minutes. The bodies were initially buried in mass graves, but later exhumed and cremated on large grates made from railway tracks to erase evidence of the crimes.

The entire operation was run by a small detachment of German SS officers and roughly a hundred Ukrainian guards, with Jewish prisoners forced to perform the daily labor—unloading trains, cutting hair, sorting belongings, and burning corpses. Those workers were themselves regularly executed and replaced. 

The efficiency of Treblinka’s killing process reflected the bureaucratic genius of Eichmann and the cold coordination of Heinrich Himmler’s Operation Reinhard team under Odilo Globocnik. Within the span of just thirteen months, from July 1942 to August 1943, Treblinka accomplished what the Nazis called “the liquidation of the Jewish question” for much of central Poland.

In early August 1943, the Jewish laborers, realizing they would soon be killed, staged a desperate revolt. They overpowered several guards, set fire to camp buildings, and about 300 escaped through the perimeter. Fewer than 100 survived the war. In response, the SS closed and dismantled Treblinka, plowing over the site, planting trees, and erecting a farmhouse to disguise the ground saturated with ash and bone.

Today, Treblinka is a place of stark silence. The forest clearing is marked by 17,000 jagged stones symbolizing destroyed Jewish communities—each one a village or town erased from the map. There are no buildings, no ruins, only the memorial stones and the undulating earth where hundreds of thousands perished. Standing there, one feels the scale of the killing machine that Eichmann’s logistics and the Nazi state’s ruthless precision made possible—a place where almost an entire people vanished without a trace.

The Chelmno Nazi Death Camp

 Yesterday, I visited Chelmno, known in German as Kulmhof, the first Nazi death camp established for the systematic extermination of Jews. I am traveling with my friends Cliff and Emily. I met Cliff and Frankfurt. We drove together to meet Emily western Poland. We will be visiting the Treblinka, Majdanek and Bergen Belsen death camps.  

Chelmno operated in occupied Poland between December 1941 and March 1943, and again from June 1944 to January 1945. Located about 60 kilometers northwest of Łódź, near the small town of Chełmno nad Nerem, the camp became a prototype for later extermination centers such as Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Its purpose was explicit from the outset: to annihilate the Jewish population of the Łódź Ghetto and surrounding areas, as well as Roma, Polish political prisoners, and Soviet POWs.

Chelmno consisted of two main sites: the manor house (Schlosslager) in the village, and a forest clearing (Waldlager) about four kilometers away. Prisoners arrived first at the manor, where they were told they would be resettled for labor. After being stripped of their belongings, they were led into sealed trucks disguised as transport vehicles. These “gas vans” were among the earliest tools of industrial killing: their exhaust pipes were redirected into the cargo compartments, asphyxiating victims with carbon monoxide as the trucks drove to the forest site. When the vehicles arrived, the bodies were unloaded and buried in large mass graves.

From the beginning, the process was designed for speed and concealment. The Nazis destroyed personal documents, burned clothing, and used Jewish laborers—known as the Sonderkommando—to bury or later exhume and cremate the corpses. When those prisoners became weak or posed a risk of escape, they were themselves murdered and replaced. The first phase of killing, between 1941 and 1943, claimed around 150,000 lives. After a brief closure, the camp resumed operations in 1944 to liquidate what remained of the Łódź Ghetto—one of the last surviving Jewish enclaves in Nazi-occupied Europe. By the time Soviet troops reached the area in January 1945, at least 200,000 people had been murdered in Chelmno.

Unlike Auschwitz or Majdanek, Chelmno left almost no visible trace of its machinery of death. The SS demolished the manor house in 1943, burned the forest site, and leveled the evidence. When you walk through the grounds today, as you did, you find only silence and markers—memorial stones designating the sites of the mass graves, foundations of the manor, and remnants of the cremation pits. This absence is itself part of Chelmno’s historical weight: the first experiment in extermination left behind almost nothing except testimony and earth filled with ash.

Only a handful of survivors lived to tell what happened there, among them Mordechai Podchlebnik and Simon Srebnik, whose postwar accounts were recorded in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Their recollections, calm and precise, stand in for the thousands whose voices were extinguished. The forest and the clearings around Chelmno are now preserved as a memorial, with plaques in Polish, Hebrew, and English acknowledging the destruction of Jewish life in the Łódź region. The camp’s ruins, barren and quiet, convey what no museum can fully express: the deliberate erasure of an entire world, carried out at the edge of a small Polish village.

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is a novel built on the slow recovery of memory. Rather than unfolding in a straight line, the story emerges through chance encounters and long conversations between the narrator and Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian. At first, Austerlitz appears as an eccentric scholar, obsessed with fortifications and railway stations. Gradually, however, we learn he is a Holocaust survivor, sent on a Kinder transport from Prague to Britain at the age of four. His life becomes clearer little by little, as if he himself is uncovering it alongside the reader.

Sent away from Prague on a Kindertransport at the age of four, he was raised in Wales under another name, unaware of his origins. His adoptive parents, though well-meaning, effectively erased his past. They gave him shelter but not a history, safety but not belonging. Their refusal to acknowledge his origins—partly out of love, partly out of denial—left him doubly orphaned: first by the Nazis, and then by silence. His adoptive mother dies then his adoptive father, an eccentric minister, loses his sanity when Austerlitz is still a child.

The brilliance of Sebald’s narrative lies in this pacing. The novel mirrors how trauma is recalled: obliquely, unevenly, with sudden moments of clarity followed by long silences. As Austerlitz revisits train stations, libraries, and archives, memory attaches itself to physical spaces, and the architecture he studies becomes a metaphor for his own buried history.

Sebald’s novel is also a meditation on the way the Holocaust (and by extension the entire war in which the Holocaust occurred) brings pain and trauma to lives far from the horrors of the Nazi death camps. The victims were not only those who were murdered in camps, but also those who survived in exile—especially the children. Austerlitz, though “saved” from the Nazis, grows up an orphan of memory, severed from language, family, and belonging. His life is marked by absence: the parents he cannot remember, the home he lost before he knew it, the identity he had to reconstruct decades later. In this sense, Sebald insists that survival itself carries its own tragedy.

The use of blurred photographs embedded in the text deepens this sense of fractured memory. Images of buildings, train stations, and unidentified faces appear like ghosts, reminders of a past that resists full recovery. The photographs do not clarify the narrative; instead, they underscore its uncertainty, leaving both narrator and reader adrift in a landscape of half-revealed truths.

By the novel’s end, what remains is not closure but the recognition that some losses cannot be repaired. Austerlitz’s search is both noble and futile: he uncovers fragments of his past, but the larger picture remains irretrievably broken. Sebald’s shows that history, particularly the history of the Holocaust, is not a single story but a set of absences that shape the lives of even those who “escaped.”

Austerlitz is a masterpiece of memory, architecture, and mourning. It reminds us that the Holocaust claimed not only lives but also futures, identities, and connections—that even those rescued as children were haunted by destruction for the rest of their lives.