More than thirty years ago, while passing through Lublin, Poland, I visited the Maidanek camp, which is located on the outskirts of the city. At the time, a bus that served this working-class suburb dropped off the few visitors right in front of the camp gate. There was no parking for tourist buses and no guided tours. Only five or six people were walking around that day among the ruins of what had once been the Konzentrationslager Lublin.
This camp was just one of those built by the Nazis during the war. Along with Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz, it was one of the links in what the Nazis called the “Final Solution”, the extermination of millions of European Jews. It was not one of the largest; between 80,000 and 200,000 human beings were murdered there, compared to nearly 800,000 in the Treblinka camp alone. The Nazis locked up Jews there (notably the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), but also Polish resistance fighters and tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, also considered subhumans, only fit to be reduced to slavery before being gassed.
As in other Nazi camps, people died at Maidanek not only in the gas chambers, but also by injection of phenol or by shooting: during the sinisterly named operation Erntefest (“Harvest Festival”), decided on because of the revolts that had taken place in the Sobibor and Treblinka camps, 18,000 Jewish prisoners were shot in the head in a single day. Others died there from the mistreatment inflicted by the guards, from malnutrition, from exhaustion. Even for those deportees who were considered fit for work, life expectancy in the camps was barely a few months.
What is particularly terrifying about visiting the Maidanek camp is that everything was left as it was. Unlike Treblinka and Sobibor—where the Nazis had time to remove all traces of their crimes by dismantling the facilities, even going so far as to plow the soil, replant the sites with trees, and set up seemingly ordinary and peaceful farms—at Maidanek they were taken by surprise.
Before fleeing the approaching Red Army, the SS tried to set fire to the camp. But the fire did not destroy everything. The gas chambers, some barracks, watchtowers and barbed wire have remained intact to this day. The impression it makes on visitors is truly astonishing.
Unlike Auschwitz, of which we have all seen images and of which multiple documentaries allow the visitor to form an idea in advance, nothing prepares the visitor to wander among the preserved remains of this Maidanek camp, where solitude and silence reinforce the impression of oppression that one feels, as if time had stopped, as if the SS and their last prisoners had left the day before, as if the terror were still there.
After visiting the camp, to return to the city, one had to cross a poor suburb, which also seemed forgotten on the margins of History. On the gray gables of the buildings, on the metal or concrete walls that separated this or that warehouse from the street, anti-Semitic graffiti appeared here and there; one could even see a few swastikas painted there, unmistakable signs that this horror embodied by Maidanek did not belong only to the past.
If I decided to share this memory, it is not only because this week is the anniversary of the entry of the Red Army into this camp of Maidanek (July 23, 1944) which brought the first concrete proof of the existence of this hellish concentration camp set up by the Nazis.
This is also because several indications show that in recent years there has been a tendency to forget and deny this tragedy of the Holocaust. I am not only talking about the odious enterprise of these anti-Semitic revisionists who seek by all means to undermine public confidence in the evidence of this extermination of the Jews which they otherwise consider to be “a minor detail” of the Second World War (according to Jean-Marie Le Pen).
Another, more insidious revisionism has recently emerged. It consists not in directly denying the Jewish genocide, but in minimizing its exceptionality by comparing it (among other things by abusing the words “genocides” or “survivors”) to all sorts of other horrors or crimes against humanity: colonial wars, African slavery, the dispossession and acculturation of indigenous peoples, etc. The Holocaust and the Nazi camps then represent only one piece among others in the case against the West. The history of the last five hundred years is thus entirely Nazified.
Nazi barbarity embodies something absolutely singular in History, a History that is nevertheless not stingy with horrors and massacres. Methodically, industrially organizing the deportation from all of occupied Europe, then the murder of six million men, women and children on the sole insane pretext that they were of Jewish descent relegates Guernica and even the Rape of Nanking to the rank of artisanal carnages. Despite all that can be said about it, the Holocaust remains a standard of horror that must not be forgotten and even less tarnished by inflicting on it this other form of amnesia which consists in trivializing it.