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.

Becoming a US Citizen While Serving in the Military

While I was in Washington DC advocating for Ukraine, I met Lesya Jurgovsky. We were both members of the Pennsylvania delegation. She lives in the Pittsburgh area. 

Lesya emigrated from Yazlovets, Ukraine, in 2004. She worked in agriculture after earning a PhD in biology in Ukraine.  Then in 2009, she joined the U.S. Army Reserve, serving for eight years.  The next year, in 2010, while on duty with the Army, she became a U.S. citizen at a ceremony for serving soldiers.  

In addition to her work with the American Coalition for Ukraine, Lesya is the President of Sunshine for Tomorrow Foundation
, a non-profit that supports and orphans and children with disabilities.  

Since I first joined the U.S. military in 1972, I have met and served with many soldiers who became U.S. citizens while on active duty with the military.  One of the soldiers I served with became a citizen at Camp Adder, Iraq. 

During the same advocacy trip, I met Ihor Chernik. He also emigrated to the U.S. after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ihor served in the Soviet Army in Poland. I was a tank commander on the other side of the border.  Now Lesya and Ihor and I are all together in support of Ukraine against the Russian invaders. 

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.

Anselm Kiefer in the Panthéon--The first major new art installation in the Pantheon in a century

 

I returned to the Panthéon after previous visits over the past decade, to see the first new art exhibit in crypt of the Republic in a century.  And the exhibit is by a German  artist!— Anselm Kiefer. Six vast glass vitrines catching the cold light from the dome, full of wreckage and silence.

I walk into the Panthéon patriotism, heroic scale; the new exhibit by Kiefer is frailty and fragility and pain enclosed in glass. Commissioned for the 2020 panthéonisation of Maurice Genevoix, author of Ceux de 14, the German artist installed six towering glass-and-steel vitrines—now permanent—plus two large canvases that were shown on loan. In the six enclosures are rusted barbed wire, scorched garments, lead books, concrete shards, and sprigs of wheat sit in suspended collision, as if a battlefield had been archived rather than cleaned up.

The materials aren’t metaphors; they’re blunt instruments sharply contrasting celebration of heroes. The Pantheon is France’s national crypt of heroes—Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola, Curie—built to canonize clarity. Keifer's vitrines are enclosed chaos, monuments for a century that never stopped bleeding, a counter-monument to the patriotic and heroic. The work keys directly off Genevoix’s witness to the Great War; phrases from Ceux de 14 (so I have read about this book of World War I) run through the installations like exposed wiring. You don’t admire these pieces so much as absorb shock from them.

This is the first major new art commission in the Panthéon in nearly a century—the last comparable addition was Bouchard’s 1924 memorial. Kiefer isn’t just adding objects; he’s reopening the monument after a hundred years of stasis.

The clash between neoclassical order and Kiefer’s scorched-earth art is dramatic. The vitrines are not subtle. Kiefer puts the horror of war in the midst of patriotic celebration, a new dimension in this room that is the French nation’s memory chamber.

Standing in the great hall, I thought of how I was drawn to the patriotic and heroic sinceI was a child, but then saw the ruin and wreckage that is actual war. Kiefer puts the horror front and center in contrast to the beauty and majesty of the rest of the building and its art.

Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and the Moral Backbone of the American Founders

 

When Marcus Tullius Cicero retreated to his villa at Tusculum in 45 B.C., he was a man in mourning. His daughter Tullia had died, the Roman Republic was collapsing into dictatorship, and his public voice—once Rome’s conscience—was being silenced. In Tusculan Disputations, Cicero turned from politics to philosophy, trying to answer a question that has haunted thinkers ever since: how can the soul find peace amid loss, injustice, and mortality? His answer, grounded in Stoicism and Roman virtue, became a handbook for enduring adversity with dignity. Eighteen centuries later, that same book helped shape a new republic across the Atlantic.

The American Founders’ Roman Education

The American founders did not just admire Cicero—they lived in his intellectual world. Latin was the bedrock of their education. They read De Officiis, De Re Publica, and Tusculan Disputations as moral training, not antiquarian study. George Washington, who lacked formal classical schooling, nevertheless absorbed Cicero’s Stoic lessons through his voracious reading and through the culture of republican virtue that the ancients infused into the colonies. Washington’s biographers record that he owned and reread the Tusculan Disputations, keeping it among his most personal books. His calm endurance during Valley Forge, his refusal of a crown, and his farewell to public life all echo Cicero’s vision of the wise man who rules himself.

John Adams, the philosopher of the Revolution, read Cicero in the original Latin. He quoted him incessantly in letters to his son and to Jefferson. Adams saw in Cicero a model of the citizen-orator—one who speaks truth to corruption and whose virtue is tested by exile and defeat. “All the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united in the same character,” Adams wrote. Jefferson agreed, calling Cicero’s writings “the most precious repository of ethics that ever was written.” Benjamin Franklin, too, drew upon the Stoic calm and self-discipline that Cicero praised; his Poor Richard’s Almanack distilled ancient maxims into a distinctly American vernacular.

Philosophy for a Republic

The Tusculan Disputations are structured as five dialogues, each exploring how philosophy can heal the soul: overcoming the fear of death, bearing pain, moderating grief, mastering passion, and cultivating virtue. Cicero argues that happiness depends on the soul’s independence from fortune. The wise man does not deny pain or injustice; he transcends them through reason and moral habit. Virtue, not pleasure or wealth, is the only true good.

These ideas became the ethical grammar of the founders. In a world without kings, they needed an inner monarchy—a self-governing conscience. Cicero’s insistence that liberty depends on virtue provided the philosophical foundation for republican government. As Washington put it in his Farewell Address, “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” That sentiment is lifted almost directly from Cicero’s moral writings.

The Tusculans also taught the founders a disciplined approach to emotion. Cicero, mourning his daughter, reasoned that grief must be tamed, not indulged. “The wise man,” he wrote, “will not be broken by sorrow.” Washington’s stoic reserve—the restraint that baffled and impressed his contemporaries—was not emotional vacancy but moral discipline. It was the Roman ideal transposed into the wilderness of the New World.

From Roman Virtue to American Character

The founders’ world was steeped in Roman imagery. The Senate, the Republic, the eagle, the fasces—all came from the classical vocabulary of power tempered by reason. But Cicero’s influence went deeper than symbols. His Tusculan Disputations taught that the state is only as sound as the souls who compose it. Liberty cannot survive without self-command. The book became, for the founders, a moral exercise—a way to prepare the mind for civic duty.

Adams, who often despaired of democracy’s passions, leaned on Cicero’s faith in rational discourse. Jefferson, despite his Enlightenment optimism, drew on Cicero’s belief that nature itself prescribes virtue. Even Franklin’s pragmatism—the idea that moral improvement comes through habit and self-examination—echoes Cicero’s advice that philosophy is practice, not theory.

When Washington surrendered his commission at Annapolis in 1783, he enacted a Ciceronian drama: the virtuous man relinquishing power to save the republic. Cicero had failed to save Rome; Washington succeeded, at least for a time, in embodying what Cicero imagined—the statesman guided by reason, uncorrupted by ambition, serene before fate.

Why It Still Matters

Reading Tusculan Disputations today, we feel both the distance of centuries and the immediacy of its counsel. Cicero’s Rome fell; America endures, but not without strain. The founders believed that philosophy could fortify freedom, that private virtue was the public armor of a republic. Their debt to Cicero is not academic—it is existential. As long as Americans prize liberty, they inherit the same challenge that haunted Cicero: how to remain free inside, even when the world convulses outside.

Cicero wrote to console himself. The founders read him to strengthen a nation. In both cases, Tusculan Disputations proved that wisdom is the republic’s first defense.

The Five Dialogues of Tusculan Disputations

Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (45 B.C.) are organized into five books, each a conversation between Cicero and an unnamed interlocutor. The purpose of each dialogue is practical—how philosophy can train the soul to rise above fear, pain, and misfortune.

Book I: On Contempt of Death.
Cicero opens with the bold claim that death is not an evil. The soul, he argues, is immortal—or if it is not, then oblivion is no harm. Fear of death enslaves the mind; freedom begins with accepting mortality.

Book II: On Bearing Pain.
Here Cicero fuses Stoic and Platonic ideas: pain is endurable because it touches the body, not the soul. Virtue consists in fortitude—the mastery of sensation by reason.

Book III: On Grief.
Written while mourning his daughter Tullia, this section turns personal. Cicero insists grief must yield to discipline and reason. Excessive sorrow, he says, dishonors both the living and the dead.

Book IV: On the Other Disturbances of the Mind.
Cicero examines anger, lust, envy, and fear as “diseases of the soul.” Philosophy, properly practiced, is medicine; it cures by restoring inner balance and self-command.

Book V: On the Sufficiency of Virtue for Happiness.
The final dialogue crowns the work: virtue alone guarantees happiness, regardless of fortune or fate. The wise person, governed by reason and moral duty, remains free even under tyranny or exile.

In these five meditations, Cicero forged the ethical code that later guided Washington, Adams, and Jefferson—the conviction that liberty begins within the soul.