ushmm.org
What are you looking for?
Search
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Museum Education Research History Remembrance Conscience Join & donate
Holocaust Encyclopedia
ARTICLE COMMENTS PRINT E-MAIL THIS PAGE
Find ID cards FIND ID CARDS
FIND ARTICLES Find articles
PERSONAL STORIES
Lublin/Majdanek Concentration Camp: Conditions
Describes deportation to and conditions in Majdanek
Describes deportation to and conditions in Majdanek
Abraham Lewent
Describes deportation to and conditions in Majdanek [1989 interview]

Real Player Real Player >
Full transcript:
We went to that Umschlagplatz. We were sitting three days over
there, without water, without anything, for three days. And it was
hot. On the third day they gave us water, and they said we're going
to leave. Where we're going, we don't know. They put us on trains.
I was together with my father, and with this man, and his wife, or
his sister, was it? And they took us to Majdanek. Majdanek was a
camp near Lublin, and over there was five fields. That means every
field had eight or nine hundred people and it was barracks and
there's nothing to do Majdanek. The only thing you were Majdanek
you did, you sit sometime all day long, and sometime they took you
out to work and a half of them never came back. They make you sit
all day long and breaking up from big stones to make little stones,
or digging holes, digging ditches, and covering the ditches up.
That was the work. That's what you call, uh, a camp what actually
is annihilation...they annihilate people, actually. Very little
food. Very little food.
Born Warsaw, Poland
1924

Like other Jews, the Lewents were confined to the Warsaw ghetto. In 1942, as Abraham hid in a crawl space, the Germans seized his mother and sisters in a raid. They perished. He was deployed for forced labor nearby, but escaped to return to his father in the ghetto. In 1943, the two were deported to Majdanek, where Abraham's father died. Abraham later was sent to Skarzysko, Buchenwald, Schlieben, Bisingen, and Dachau. U.S. troops liberated Abraham as the Germans evacuated prisoners.
 
 
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Collections

Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
About the Museum    |    Accessibility    |    Legal    |    Contact Us