I took this from the train back from Majdanek. Fields outside Cienin, in Wielkopolska, fifty-odd kilometres from Chełmno nad Nerem.
The train was carrying me away from a place where people were murdered. The fields were ordinary.
Chełmno was the first German extermination camp. The Germans built it for no purpose but killing, and they called it Kulmhof. The gas vans began running there in December 1941; by the end, more than a hundred and fifty thousand people had been murdered there, almost all of them Jews.
© 2026 Bryan R. Hinton
Between five and six million Polish citizens were killed, three million of them Jews. Much of the killing was carried out on Polish soil: at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, Majdanek, and Chełmno, all of them German Nazi camps and killing centers built in German-occupied Poland.
Whole towns where no one came home.
A civilization of a thousand years, destroyed in five.
The fields are beautiful now. The forests have grown back. The track is still there. It is the same line: the transports from Łódź came along it as far as Koło, east of here. The last ten kilometres were made in lorries, on narrow-gauge trains, and on foot. Rye and wheat move in the wind; storks return in spring; villages keep their names. That beauty is not a contradiction of what happened. It is the same country: the one that was taken from the people who lived in it, and the one that outlived them.
This soil was left in someone's arms before memory began.
What remains is the duty to remember precisely. The names. The places. The dates. The silence in those places now is not empty. It is the shape of what was taken.
This is a shared history, and it cannot be told without Poland. For nearly a thousand years, Polish citizens (Jews and Catholics, scholars and merchants) built one of the great civilizations of Europe. From the Statute of Kalisz in 1264, through the academies of Kraków and Lublin, to the printing houses of Warsaw and the streets of Wilno, they wrote in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. They fought together in Polish uprisings. They rest together in Polish soil.
And then they were murdered, the Jews hunted until there was almost no one left to find. And the world let it happen. And the fields kept growing: beautiful, indifferent, alive.
To study this history through the objects, documents, and testimonies that preserve it, I recommend:
State Museum at Majdanek
Lublin
Museum of the Former German Kulmhof Death Camp in Chełmno on Ner
Chełmno nad Nerem
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Warsaw
Ośrodek „Brama Grodzka – Teatr NN”
Lublin
Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute
Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, Warsaw
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