In Part 1, I showed that the Lithuanian state’s official position on the service of Lithuanian guards at Majdanek is “tales and stretching the facts”—and that three successive directors of the Genocide Centre across eleven years have never corrected it. Now I want to make clear exactly what Lithuania is dismissing.

What Baltušis-Žvejys’s Guards Lived With Every Day

The Majdanek State Museum and the eyewitness record of Jerzy Kwiatkowski—a prisoner for 485 days whose account the Museum calls one of the most important testimonies of the camp—do not describe a site where the perimeter was sealed off from knowledge of what happened inside. They describe the opposite. They describe a camp where the killing was visible, audible, and physically unavoidable to anyone stationed at its boundaries.

The Museum’s own documentation records that a tractor hauling a trailer loaded with the bodies of gassed Jews drove through the camp gate and out toward the Krępiec woods three to four times a day. The trailer was covered with quilts, but witnesses recorded that the wind regularly blew part of the covering aside, exposing limbs protruding from underneath. The entire load visibly shifted and swayed with every jerk of the tractor as it climbed the hill past the guard positions. That was not a hidden operation. That was a daily routine passing directly through the perimeter that Lithuanian guards controlled.

When the crematorium could not keep pace with the volume of murdered Jews, corpses were burned on open-air incineration pyres laid out at multiple points across the camp. The Museum records describe what witnesses saw: a huge fire surrounded by a low embankment, billows of grey and black smoke rising and blowing in every direction, the choking stench of burning human remains. Beside the fire lay piles of hundreds of bodies—emaciated, bruised, twisted, sometimes completely black from beatings. Workers pulled corpses by their hands and feet, swung them, and threw them to men standing on the embankment who heaved them onto the flames. Before the bodies were burned, gold was pried from the teeth of the dead and hair was cut from the heads of gassed women.

That smoke rose above the wire. That stench drifted across the perimeter. The guards did not need to enter the camp to know what was burning. The city of Lublin, more than a mile away, complained about the smell. The men stationed at the fence breathed it every shift.

And there was sound. The Hoover Institution’s analysis of Kwiatkowski’s account identifies what haunted him most: the permanent sound of mothers whose children had been torn from them and sent to the gas chambers. Kwiatkowski described the “crying, sobbing, and wails” as a constant feature of the camp’s atmosphere—not an occasional event but a condition, hanging over the camp the way the smoke hung over the pyres. Every guard at every post along that wire heard it. On November 3, 1943, when eighteen thousand Jews were marched to trenches and machine-gunned in waves, the SS played music through loudspeakers to mask the sound of automatic weapons—Kwiatkowski heard a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)