Pastewnik Skansen Przeworsk Southeast Poland
29 September 2015
Dear Friends
A View from the River
Bug Barry and Margaret Williamson After a summer in northern Scandinavia and a reflective
journey south through the Baltic Republics, we have now followed the River Bug down
through Eastern Poland. This View from the River Bug supplements the earlier View from the Baltic
Republics. The overall aim of both pieces is to contrast the overwhelming
importance of the European Union, and the peace and security it gives in
Eastern Europe, with the shallowness of the self-serving debate on Britain's
continuing EU membership. What a difference in history between east and west;
what a difference in perspective. There are many facets to the River Bug: its name derives
from the old German word Baug, meaning bent or winding, which it certainly is.
Traditionally it divided the Roman Catholic west from the Orthodox east.
Following the joint German-Russian invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, it
formed the dividing line between the two armies (until 22 June 1941). Today the
Bug separates Poland from southern Belarus and northern Ukraine. The river is also the location of three extermination camps
operated by the Germans in 1942 and 1943: Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, all of
which we have just visited for the second time. Most of the 70 camps
established by the Germans in Poland and 15 other countries were designed to
provide slave labour through hundreds of satellite camps operated by German industry.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, many prisoners did forced work outside in one of the
many factories, construction projects, farms, quarries or coalmines set up
around the camp and owned by German companies. For example, Bayer Chemicals (proud
inventors of Aspirin) bought female
prisoners in batches of 150 from Auschwitz for experiments with drugs. None
survived the medical trials.
In these work camps, severe punishment or death was a consequential
detail; people deemed unsuitable for work on arrival, or who later became unfit
for work, were killed without mercy. In the extermination camps, the only work
available for a few chosen inmates was to help with the killing, with the
sorting of clothing and possessions of the dead and with the disposal of the
bodies.
The three extermination camps along the River Bug were a major
part of the 'final solution', masterminded by Reinhardt Heydrich: indeed it was
known as 'Aktion Reinhardt'. Using national railway networks, people were
herded directly from cattle wagons into the gas chambers without ceremony. They
were told they were taking a shower; instead in most cases diesel engine
exhaust took 20 minutes to deliver a slow and painful death. In other cases
petrol engines were used, or the more expensive but quicker-acting Zyklon B
which released hydrogen cyanide gas.
France was spared from becoming his next posting when Reinhardt
Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in May 1942, by British-trained Czech agents
parachuted in for the purpose.
Treblinka and Sobibor are located in remote forests, the
trees standing in silent witness to scenes of atrocity beyond imagination.
Belzec is on the edge of a small town on a still-busy railway line and a main road
into nearby Ukraine.
The Polish government has made a very successful effort to
preserve what little was left of these extermination camps, following their
destruction by the Germans in retreat before the advancing Russians in 1944.
Today they are presented as 'museums' full of memorials, artefacts and information
in Polish, English and Hebrew. Most chilling are the photographs showing the
humiliation of the Jews concentrated in ghettoes, their degrading transportation
and their final annihilation in the death camp itself. Personal written
accounts by some of the very few survivors often accompany the images.
A fourth camp revisited on our journey, Majdanek, lies in a
suburb of Lublin, a major city and regional capital in southeast Poland. Trolley
buses run along the dual carriageway past its gates. It had several functions:
providing forced labour for local German industries, storing and sorting
belongings taken from its own victims and those of the River Bug extermination
camps (including shoes, clothing, jewellery, hair, spectacles and gold teeth)
and imprisoning Russian POW's. It also took part in Aktion Reinhardt.
Covering some 90 hectares (220 acres) Majdanek is among the
best preserved concentration camps in occupied Europe. Extant are rows of grim barrack
huts, double electric fences, watchtowers, gas chambers and crematoria ovens. A
mountain of ashes under a concrete roof speaks to the scale of the operation:
80,000 people were killed at this site.
Scenes from Extermination
Camps along the River Bug:
www.magbazpictures.com/treblinka-extermination-camp.html
www.magbazpictures.com/sobibor-extermination-camp.html
www.magbazpictures.com/belzec-extermination-camp.html
And the Concentration
Camp in Lublin:
www.magbazpictures.com/majdanek-concentration-camp.html
Deaths in the Four Camps Visited in Poland:
Belzec 430,000 Majdanek 80,000 Sobibor 170,000 Treblinka 870,000
Total 1,550,000
Deaths in Other Camps in Poland:
Auschwitz-Birkenau 1,100,000 Chelmo 150,000 Gross Rosen 40,000 Plaszow 9,000 Soldau 13,000 Stutthof 65,000 Warsaw 200,000
Total 1,577,000
Overall Total 3,127,000
These numbers do not always include deaths and arbitrary
murder in ghettoes, during transportation and in industry-run slave labour
units.
Other Countries in
which German Concentration and Slave Labour Camps were Operated
Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Channel Islands, Croatia, Czech
Republic, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway,
Serbia, Ukraine.
From Final Solution
to Final Irony
It was in the southern German town of Augsburg in 1893 that
Rudolf Diesel demonstrated the first working prototype of his eponymous engine.
He had developed the earlier patented work of the English inventor Herbert
Stuart, whose first crude engine ran for 6 hours in 1892. Stuart took the work
no further and Diesel is credited with bringing the invention into practical
use by 1897. To think, we might have been filling up with 'stuart'.
Thanks to Krupp, Benz and MAN, Germany was among the first
countries to use the newly developed diesel engine to pump oil and to power
tractors, ships, submarines, trucks, tanks, cars and even airships.
Today it seems that every German town has a Rudolf Diesel
Strasse in its industrial zone.
In 1940 the Germans developed a van which was equipped as a
mobile gas chamber. The vehicle had an airtight compartment for victims,
into which diesel exhaust fumes were transmitted while the engine was running.
This was later developed into the much larger-scale use of gas in concentration
and extermination camps.
For example, between July 1942 and October 1943 a diesel
engine taken from a captured Russian tank was used at the Treblinka
extermination camp to kill about 870,000 people, mainly Jews. The deadly agent
was the carbon monoxide present in the exhaust.
Burning diesel produces much less global-warming carbon
dioxide than petrol, but a lot more of the potentially fatal gases nitric oxide
and nitrogen dioxide. This has caused up to 60,000 premature deaths a year in
America alone. The current scandal about diesel emission test rigging by German
manufacturers VW and Audi (with subsidiaries Seat and Skoda) can only have
added to this figure. German Reunification The following article in the Guardian of 3 October 2015 explored the
attempts at German reunification, celebrating its 25th anniversary. In
summary, the article continues the theme that east is east and west is west,
and there are still large gaps in development in several sectors.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/02/german-reunification-25-years-on-how-different-are-east-and-west-really
We are now travelling
in our seventh country this summer that was formerly in the Soviet Union or
occupied by it for 45 years – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia,
Hungary and now Romania. The contrasts with Scandinavia and Western Europe are
sharp, wide-ranging and clearly defined. Why can't the UK join wholeheartedly
in the project to create what Gorbachev (the architect of the fall of the
Soviet Union) called 'Our European Home'. Some rooms in that home still need
renovation. People in Britain talk of 'Europe' as if it were different place.
The questions isn't 'shall we join Europe'; the fact is that we are a
constituent part of Europe and we should act accordingly.
|