Russia at war 1941-1945

"Kindermörder, Kindermörder!" [ Child-murderers.] and the Germans went through the camp, at first at an ordinary pace, and then faster and faster, till they ran in a frantic panicky stampede, and they were green with terror, and their hands shook and their teeth chattered...

I shall describe only briefly some of the other aspects of that vast industrial enterprise that the Murder Camp represented. There were those trenches in Krempecki Forest, a few miles away, where they murdered 10,000 Jews on that 3rd of November. Here speed was

even more important than business. They shot them, without taking off their clothes, even without taking the women's handbags and the children's toys away. Amongst the stinking corpses, I saw a small child with a teddy-bear... But this was unusual; the great principle of the Murder Camp was that nothing should be wasted. There was, for instance, that

enormous barn-like structure which had contained 850,000 pairs of boots and shoes—

among them tiny baby shoes; now, by the end of August, half the shoes had gone:

hundreds of people from Lublin had come and taken whole bagfuls of shoes.

"How disgusting," somebody remarked.

Colonel Grosz shrugged his shoulders. "What do you expect? After having had the Germans here for years, people stopped being squeamish. They had lived for years

buying and selling and speculating; they are short of shoes, so they say to themselves:

'These are perfectly good shoes; someone will get them eventually; why not grab them while the going's good?'"

And then—perhaps the most horrifying thing of all—there was the enormous building

called the "Chopin Lager", the Chopin Warehouse, because, by a curious irony, it happened to be in a street called after the composer. Outside, there was still a notice, with the swastika on top, announcing a German public meeting:

Kundgebung.

Donnerstag, 20, Juli 1944.

Reichsredner P.G. Geyer.

Im Hause der Nationalsozialisten, Lublin

[Meeting, Thursday, July 20, 1944. Speaker from the Reich, Party Comrade Geyer, in the House of National Socialism, Lublin.]

One wondered what kind of cheerful news the Partei-Genosse had to tell the Maidanek murderers a couple of days before the Russians entered Lublin, and while most of the Germans must have been busy packing up. It was also the day of the bomb that had failed to kill Hitler...

The Chopin Warehouse was like a vast, five-storey department store, part of the

grandiose Maidanek Murder Factory. Here the possessions of hundreds of thousands of

murdered people were sorted and classified and packed for export to Germany. In one big room there were thousands of trunks and suitcases, some still with carefully written-out labels; there was a room marked Herrenschuhe and another marked Damenschuhe; here were thousands of pairs of shoes, all of much better quality than those seen in the big dump near the camp. Then there was a long corridor with thousands of women's dresses, and another with thousands of overcoats. Another room had large wooden shelves all

along it, through the centre and along the walls; it was like being in a Woolworth store: here were piled up hundreds of safety razors, and shaving brushes, and thousands of pen-knives and pencils. In the next room were piled up children's toys: teddy-bears, and celluloid dolls and tin automobiles by the hundred, and simple jigsaw puzzles, and an American-made Mickey Mouse... And so on, and so on. In a junk-heap I even found the

manuscript of a Violin Sonata, Op. 15 by somebody called Ernst J. Weil of Prague. What hideous story was behind this?

On the ground floor there had been the Accounts Department. Letters were strewn all

over the place; mostly letters from various SS and Nazi organisations to the "Chopin Lager, Lublin", asking to be sent this and that. Many of the letters were orders from the Lublin SS and Police Chief: on November 3, 1942 a carefully-typed letter instructed the Chopin Lager to supply the Hitler Youth Camp, Company 934, with a long list of articles including blankets, table linen, crockery, bed-linen, towels, kitchen utensils, etc. The letter specified that all this was wanted for 4,000 children evacuated from the Reich.

There was another list of articles for 2,000 German children who required "sports shirts, training suits, coats, aprons, gym shoes, skiing boots, plus-fours, warm underwear, warm gloves, woollen scarves". The department store was euphemistically called

"Altsachenverwertungsstelle, Lublin" (Lublin Disposal Centre for Second-hand Goods).

There was also a letter from a German woman living in Lublin asking for a pram and a complete layette for her newborn child. Another document showed that in the first few months of 1944 alone eighteen railway wagons of goods from the Lublin warehouse had

been sent to Germany.