Belzec - July 14

Memorial at Belzec

Memorial at Belzec

Map of Belzec and neighboring communities in Poland

Belzec is a small town located ten miles from the present-day Polish-Ukrainian border. In 1942 Germans established one of the first death camps. During the ten months of its existence approximately 450,000 Jews were killed. In 1944, SS and police authorities in Lublin District began construction of a killing center in Belzec. The killing center at Belzec began operations on March 17, 1942. It was the first stationary killing facility established by the SS and served as a training ground for future operations of that kin. Experience gained in Belzec was later applied at the other killing centers established later at Treblinka, Sobibor, and eventually Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Jews were brought to Belzec from ghettos nearby as well as those from the Lublin, Lwow, and Krakow Districts. Many of the victims were murdered during often brutal deportation actions. After arrival at Belzec, victims were told that they had arrived at a labor camp and needed to undress and take a shower. Victims had to run undressed along a narrow path that led directly into gas chambers labeled as showers. Once the doors were sealed, auxiliary police guards started an engine located outside the building. Carbon monoxide was funneled into the chambers, killing all those inside.
In October 1942, German SS and police began to exhume the mass graves at Belzec and burn the bodies. The Germans also used a mchine to crush bone fragments into powder. By late spring 1943, Jewish forced laborers, guarded by the SS had completed the task of exhuming the bodies, burning them, and dismantling the camp.
After the Belzec camp was dismantled, the Germans ploughed over the site, built a manor house there, and planted trees and crops to disguise the area as a farm. Soviet forces overran the region in July 1944.

In 2004 the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and its Polish partners completed an almost ten-year process of creating a new monument to the victims of Belzec.