The horrors of Majdanek 

Today at Majdanek we witnessed death. Although last night we talked as a group on what was going to happen today, nothing could fully prepare us for what we saw. We arrived to see a beautiful field of green grass and flowers but only learned the horrors there were far beyond our grasp. The gas chamber was stained blue from Zyclone B and still had scratch marks engraved into the concrete walls. We continued into the barracks, which were actually just horse stables with bunks beds. The crematorium was just as horrific not only from the tragedies that occurred there, but the bathtub in the corner. We learned that the Nazis would sit in the bathtub in the heat of the crematorium while our ancestors perished. This personally was the first time I really got a sense of how the Nazis felt towards the Jews and how horrific the Holocaust really was. In the end we gathered by the mass graves that held thousands of Jews killed during a harvest the Nazis performed and stood by a memorial which held a mountain of ash from those who perished. By the time we got through all of Majdanek, there wasn’t a dry eye. In the end we all pulled through as a group and comforted each other. Today will be very hard to process and we might never be fully able to comprehend what happened here, but at least we stood where our ancestors stood and remembered their memory.  
-Mac Kohn, Mason High School