My Majdanek realization

We were able to leave the camp but over 250,000 people were not able to.  Today we went to Majdanek where many, for many people, the Holocaust became the real deal.  When I first saw the Majdanek camp, it didn't seem to be big, but walking through the camp made the camp itself, and the Holocaust more personal and real.  When we were able to walk around the camp ourselves, there was a little museum within the camp.  The museum had little biographies and quotes from several people who kept journal, several stories stood out to me.  Romuald Sztaba, a physician who was arrested in January 1941 for participating in a secret organization.  Sztaba wrote that "An SS man stood in the middle, then a kapo or two non-commissioned officers, and then me.  One of them decided: to the left- gas, to the right-still can live a little.  And that's it.  He took the medical cards of the people who were going to the left, and gave all the others to me.  The sick were to be prepared for the 'transport' within four hours."  Having learned about the Holocaust for several years, we learned that when in concentration camp, officers and commanders treatment of the prisoners were horrible.  Sztaba and many other Jews worked in the camps, and even though they were considered prisoners, they still were in charge of many decisions.  Today, the first stop we went to was the showers.  We walked through the room where people had to undress, clueless to what laid ahead of them.  The next room was the shower, where there were concrete with several windows and two baths. The next room that we walked into next was when the doctors made their decisions of whether they were to go to the correct showers or the gas showers.  These few small rooms have had over thousands people walk through them and some never returned.  The experience of fear in each of these rooms were evident through the scratches on the walls and the stories that officers have told afterward.  The Majdanek camp itself was not only gas chambers, it was the at this camp that many people lost their family members and have come back to mourn them and lived in fear during the war.   We are lucky that we live in America or other places that experience minimal to no anti-semitism and that we do not have to face this evil that many Jews over 70 years ago faced.