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Before the Holocaust, Lublin was considered as “Jerusalem of the North.”
By ELDAD BECK JANUARY 26, 2025 14:52
The building of the Law faculty, which was the headquarters of the Operation Reinhard
(photo credit: ELDAD BECK)
Lublin - On the walls of the sumptuous building of the Catholic University of Lublin's Faculty of Law, there are many commemorative plaques honoring past professors of this prestigious private academic institution. The Catholic University of Lublin, founded in 1918 and today named after the late Polish pope, John Paul II, is the only private college in Poland having the status of a university. There is, however, one commemorative plaque missing on the walls: a plaque reminding that the building where the faculty is located today on 1 Spokojna Street, in the center of Lublin, was the headquarters of the murderous “Operation Reinhard.” This operation was named after Reinhard Heydrich, the central planner of the Final Solution to the Jewish question, following his assassination in Prague in the summer of 1942.
The first three “industrialized” extermination en masse German camps - Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, in which almost two million Jews were killed - were the cornerstone of this “operation” before the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau joined the German killing machinery. The Majdanek concentration camp, bordering Lublin, also became an extermination camp. But, while Majdanek and Auschwitz were concentration camps transformed into extermination camps, the three camps of “Operation Reinhard” were designed for extermination purposes only. Almost all the Jews sent there, mostly from Poland but also from the territories of the German Reich and Netherlands, were exterminated by gas upon arrival. There were almost no chances of survival.
Professor Sabina Bober, a historian dedicating her life to commemorating the Jewish history in Lublin county, says she wrote in recent years several letters to the directors of the faculty of law, asking them to consider placing a commemorative plaque recalling the crucial historical role of the faculty´s building during the Holocaust. She never got an answer to her letters. “There is antisemitism at the university,” the 48-year-old historian straightforwardly told The Jerusalem Post.
She bases this claim on her own personal experience as a teacher in this renowned academic establishment: after one of her students complained to the direction of the university that she was telling the students to read testimonies of Jewish survivors which were “full of lies” about the Holocaust, Bober was not allowed to give any more classes on this subject and was offered classes on the history of fashion. On her cell phone, she has photos of hate messages with swastikas and antisemitic slurs she received at the university. “All over the university, there are security cameras,” said Bober, “yet, until today, they were unable to identify those who left hate messages under my office door.”At the approach of the 80th anniversary of the start of Operation Reinhard in 2022, Bober decided to push forward her commemoration work and found unexpected support: the Marshall (governor) of Lublin county, Jaroslaw Stawiarski, of the main Polish opposition party, national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS). While PiS lost the last general election of 2023 after eight years of ruling Poland, Stawiarski - himself a historian and a former teacher and school director - understood the importance of Bober´s commemoration work and gave his blessing and support to it. This cooperation started with a series of events marking 80 years since Operation Reinhard and continued in a vast operation of fixing commemorative plaques for massacred Jewish communities in dozens of towns and villages all over Lublin County.
In March 2023, a commemorative monument and site for 1,500 victims of the Germans, most of them Jewish patients of the two Jewish hospitals operating in Lublin, who were murdered by German firing squads in an area close to Lublin, was inaugurated at the Marshall´s initiative. Before the Holocaust, Lublin was considered as “Jerusalem of the North”. Over 40% of its population were Jews. In some of the small rural towns around Lublin, the Jewish population amounted to 60-80% of the local population. Last March, Stawiraski opened in his offices a special department, headed by Professor Bober, in charge of the commemorative actions all over the county.
“Polish-Jewish relations are very important to me and are deep in my heart,” admitted Stawiarski, 61, in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. “That's why, together with Professor Bober, we started to commemorate the 1000 years of Jewish life in Poland. Poles and Jews lived together for almost 1000 years. Germans are the reason for the fact that there are very few Jews left in Poland. I knew about the presence of Jewish life in Lublin for a long time because I am a historian. But, the truth is that the willingness to commemorate the Jewish victims of the Holocaust was inspired by Professor Bober. She inspired me to do it. She came to me some time ago and asked me if it would be possible to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Operation Reinhard and its victims. At the time, there was a vivid discussion in Poland about the Holocaust, and there were some voices saying that Poles participated in the Holocaust. The idea of Professor Bober to commemorate the victims of Operation Reinhard and to invite descendants of Holocaust victims and survivors seemed to me a good answer to these voices”.
“The commemoration that took place in 2022 was an important event, but it was shadowed by the outbreak of the war in Ukraine”, stresses Stawiarski. “After the commemorative year to Operation Reinhard, we decided to commemorate in 124 shtetls - towns and villages where Jews had lived before the Holocaust - this past Jewish presence by placing on central buildings in all these settlements bronze commemorative plaques. These plaques are intended to serve as a testimony that Jewish people lived in all these places in our region and were murdered. We have already installed 50 such plaques, and 10 more will be unveiled soon. We still need money for 60 more plaques, but I believe that there will be people who will help us to collect the necessary funds for the remaining plaques.Every ceremony of unveiling such a plaque is a kind of public and media event. We invite school pupils and representatives of local authorities to these events in order to remind them that in their villages and towns Jews once lived, Jews who were murdered by the Germans and their collaborators. Odilo Globocnik (SS officer and head of the German police in Lublin), had his headquarters some 500 meters from my office. He, an Austrian, commanded the whole of Operation Reinhard, which was executed by Germans, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians. The commemorative plaques are there to commemorate 1000 years of Jewish life in Poland and inform everybody who was responsible for their extermination. I think it is a very good way to commemorate our Jewish brothers and to show it to the world. It is our mission.
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Questions and answers
Q: You were born in 1963. While you grew up under the communist regime, there were no relations between Poland and Israel, no Israeli delegations to the German extermination camps. What did you know then about Jewish life in the Lublin area?
A: Nothing. Not even during the time I studied history at the university. Later, in the 90s, when I became a teacher and a politician, I discovered this history. I had in front of me two versions of information on the Holocaust: one was saying that Poles were those who rescued and helped Jews, and the second was saying that Poles murdered Jews. There was propaganda according to which the Poles were also guilty of the killing of Jews and were antisemites. This propaganda was spread mainly by left elements. They selected only the worst part of History. They didn't mention that Jews were part of Polish society for hundreds of years. There was no clear unified version of what happened in Poland during those times. So I started reading about it and deepened my knowledge on this subject. From the dry facts I couldn´t conclude anything. I decided then to dig deeper and read about what Jews did in Poland, why they came here, and why there were so many of them living in Poland. I was asking myself: if they felt so bad in Poland, why so many Jews had settled down here and stayed? For hundreds of years, Poles and Jews lived next to each other. There were better, and there were worse times, but generally, our nations had friendly relations. We couldn't have become such antisemites in a few years.
Q: What was so special about the Jewish presence in the Lublin area?
A: They contributed a lot to our economy in their innovativeness and efficiency and they also brought here culture. They showed the others that we could live peacefully and in friendship together. They were an added value to our society,
Q: Auschwitz has become, over time, the main symbol of the Holocaust. However, Operation Reinhard, which was commanded from Lublin and executed mainly in this region, was more murderous and began the industrial extermination of Jews. Why is Operation Reinhard still relatively unknown in comparison to Auschwitz?
A: I am not sure what is the reason for that. Maybe German historians push in this direction. Germans have funds and money and would like to hide some historical facts. Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were death factories. Majdanek became such a center, too, but it started as a concentration camp. The other camps were strictly death camps. From the moment the Jews arrived at these camps, they had probably another hour to live. History books concentrate more on Auschwitz than on what happened here. We have to talk about what happened here; we have to show it because it was the essence of German barbarism.
Q: What do you answer to those who say that the Germans decided to build the extermination camps here, on Polish soil, because they knew that the Polish population was anti-Jewish?
A: It's false. Nonsense. I would focus my answer on the history of the extermination of Jews within Operation Reinhard. When I participate in the unveiling ceremonies of the commemorative plaques, I usually talk to young people. During the last event that took place in Ryki (a small town, whose Jewish population was exterminated in Sobibor), I asked the mayor how many Jews lived in his town before the war. He said, 4,000. Then I said to the young people who attended the event: imagine that an army invades your town - an army of Germans, Ukrainians, Latvians - surrounds it and turns it into a ghetto, takes 4,000 people to the train station, puts them in wagons and transfers them to Sobibor. After several hours all these people are dead. Did Polish soldiers and officers participate in this manhunt? No. In every country, there are some criminal antisemites. I think that in Poland there weren't so many of them. In pre-WWII times more than 3,3 million Jews lived in Poland. The narrative of the Germans is that the Poles had an inborn hatred towards Jews, and historians repeat it. If we were so antisemitic, would 44,000 Jews have lived here in Lublin? They were over 44% of Lublin´s population. It means something. They wanted to live here. They felt good here. There were in Lublin two Jewish hospitals, a big yeshiva, a Jewish society that lived and functioned normally. When the liquidation of the Jewish Ghetto of Lublin by the Germans started on March 16 and 17, 1942, there were no Polish collaborators helping the Germans. The most important thing is to educate people about what really happened.
Q: Shouldn't there be a big Museum in Lublin showing the Jewish life that was here, in Lublin and its surroundings? A Museum, about Jewish life and not about Jewish death as those in the German extermination camps?
A: It is my dream to have such a big museum. It would be great to create such a museum that will show Jewish life in Lublin and the Lubelskie region, the Jewish contribution to the economy and culture of Poland, and that Jews are like us and we cooperated with them. With such a museum we could confront ignorance and we could educate. We are thinking about it. This way we could approach the historical truth. I am not saying that there were no Polish criminals and bandits, who murdered Jews. There were. Wars bring out the bad sides of our souls. In war, many bad things can happen. Some Poles indeed took part in the Holocaust, but their percentage was very low. Who was guiltier? The Dutch, who sent in an organized way their Jewish neighbors in trains to death in Sobibor, or Polish criminals, who murdered Jews? We can also mention the French and the Hungarians. Jews from all these countries were killed here in the death camps. But it wasn't Poles who killed Jews in those camps. Dutch officials sent Jews in trains to Sobibor, and Germans and Ukrainians killed them. Not Poles.
Q: You were a teacher and school director. Education is very important to you. How do the young generations react to the work of commemoration that you are doing?
A: Their reaction to what we do is very positive. They open their eyes when they hear this history because they do not know about it. More than 80 years passed from the war. In historical publications, this history is not shown properly. In times of communism, facts were hidden. Take, for example, Henryk Wieniawski, a Polish Jew from Lublin, one of the most famous Polish composers of the 19th century, a virtuous. We should talk about people like him, but I do not know why we don't. We don't talk about the fact that Jewish and Polish cultures were interconnected and we owe a lot to the Jews since they contributed a lot to us. This is what we should tell young people. I think that not talking about these important things is unbeneficial for Polish-Jewish relations. It should be stressed that thanks to some Polish people, Jews could survive the war even though Polish lands are associated with the Holocaust and the extermination. We can not erase because of the Holocaust, initiated by Hitler and the Germans - the 800 years of cooperation and coexistence between Poles and Jews. Historians say that the first to be exterminated were the Jews as well as the Roma and Sinti, but then the Germans were planning to exterminate the Poles.
Q: Do you experience opposition to your commemoration work?
A: There are some incidents. Idiots are against it. There are some people who do not oppose the commemoration as a principle. But they oppose the idea of placing the commemoration plaques on the most important buildings in the villages and towns. There were a few cases in which the local authorities wanted to place them on side sites. But I don't agree with these oppositions. Out of 50 plaques that were already installed there were two cases of opposition, wanting to place them in a different place. There are idiots in all nations.
Q: Now, you are planning youth exchange programs with Israel. When will they start and what are your expectations from them?
A: We are planning exchanges between young sportsmen and women. I want these exchanges to be as many as possible. I think that it's very important that young people get together not only through the history of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is very important. But the youngsters should get familiar with each other in another context too. Jews are so closely related to this part of Europe that we feel a kind of unity with them. The Jews are for sure closer to us than the Arabs. I cross my fingers for Israel.
Q: What do you think of the manipulations comparing the Holocaust with the war in Gaza?
A: These ideas are spread mainly by leftists. I can only regret that they use the situation between Israel and the Palestinians for their purposes. For all Poles and Israelis, life has great value, while for Hamas and Hezbollah, human life doesn't count. They turn their people into human shields. This should not be allowed or accepted. That's why my sympathy is with the side that was attacked. The Jews were attacked. It's very clear and evident. And the Jewish people have the right to defend themselves.
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