(Illustration)
Photo: Ofir Hacohen
Fire destroys prisoners' shoes at death camp
Polish firefighters struggle for hours as fires damage Majdenak huts; thousands of shoes burned
A fire broke out Monday night in the Majdenak death camp in Poland, damaging the wooden huts on the site. It took a number of hours for firefighters to extinguish the blaze, and the management of the memorial site said thousands of prisoners' shoes had been destroyed.
The fire was reported around midnight. Firefighters struggled for some six hours to bring the flames under control.
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"About two thirds of the hut was damaged, including some 7,000 pairs of shoes that had belonged to the camp's prisoners," said a spokesman for the fire services. The site management said the cause of the fire was unknown, but believed an electrical fault was to blame.
Majdenak, located near Lublin, began operating in 1941. Jews from (former) Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, France, Greece, Netherlands and Poland were murdered there, including thousands following the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Some half a million people passed through the camp, of whom some 360,000 were murdered – over half of them Jews.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was also damaged this year when heavy flooding threatened to destroy the site. The area of huts was flooded but the water did not cause extensive damage because exhibits were taken to higher areas away from danger. All archive documents were thus rescued as well as all exhibits in the museum's ground floor.
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