A fire that broke out overnight has destroyed a wooden barracks filled with the shoes of victims of the Majdanek Nazi death camp, in Lublin, eastern Poland, officials said.
“More than half of the barracks was burned. Inside there were about 10,000 shoes and the soles of shoes of prisoners, not on display because of their poor condition,” a statement issued Tuesday by the museum on the site of the former camp said.
“The cause of the fire is not currently known, but an investigation is under way. A short-circuit remains the most likely explanation,” the statement said.
The barracks, which had once housed the camp kitchen, was not accessible to visitors.
Nazi Germany operated the Majdanek death camp between 1941-1944. According to historians, 80,000 prisoners, including 60,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis there either in its gas chambers, by execution or died of hunger, disease or exhaustion from slave labour.
In total the Nazis held 150,000 people prisoner at Majdanek.
(Source: EJP / AFP)
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5 Responses
So, little by little they are getting rid of the evidence so that they can claim that it never happened.
That room is or was accessible to people. It is also was the room that gives the greatest visual realization of what was lost, when you walk into those barracks. Even Auschwitz did not have as much of a display. I assure you this was no “accident”
Why post now this happened Tuesday afternoon
This is the work of the Persians/Amalek, yemach shmam.
of all the camps we went to see on our trip, maydanek was the truest and saddest of them all. One of the only camps that they left intact. They told us that it can be turned operational in less than 48 hours. One of us in the group even found bone fragment in the fields…
As a little sefardi teenager at the time, it was this camp that made me understand the extent of the shoah, Aushwitz for most of us looked like a museum (SADLY).
I hope this was an accident.