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The below film shows the railway station at Bełżec, filmed in June 2013. In the film I describe what happened here during 1942 when the nearby death camp killed at least 434,000 people. The station itself however is much older and as it was a border station had facilities which were much greater than its passenger and goods traffic would require. Today the station operates only very limited services. I also describe my first visit here in November 1995.
The Nazi death camp at Bełżec operated from 16 March 1942 until July 1943 although mass killings stopped at the end of November 1942. During this short time, at least 434,000 people were killed here, not only the Jewish population of the Lublin district and Galicia but also people were brought here from other countries including Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.
It was here that the Jewish populations of such large communities such as Lublin, Kraków and Lwów were brought to be murdered. In this film we can see the names of the towns where the victims came from.
Bełżec was chosen due to the access from various railway lines there. It was formerly a border point between Austria to the south and the Russian Empire to the north until the Treaty of Versailles placed it in Poland. The early twentieth century engine sheds which had been built to house Austrian locomotives were used to store the possessions of the victims.
Killing was done via what appears to have been an engine from a Soviet BT tank in gas chambers which were little more than garden sheds with two walls with the interior filled with sand. The bodies were buried in massive pits dug by a group of around 500 prisoners who were replaced as they grew weaker. The SS garrison was only around 20 - 30 people supported by around 200 auxilliaries made up largely of former Soviet POWs.
The first victims came from the Lublin ghetto with around 1,600 - 2,000 people being killed every day but later this was stepped up as the wave of killings took in other towns in the region.
After the killings stopped in November 1942, a group of POWs stayed behind to dig up the bodies and burn them on three or four pyres - work that took until the summer of 1943 when the SS decided that they had had enough and stopped the work. This is why some mass graves were not opened. The prisoners were then sent to Sobibór where they were murdered.