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 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.
