Lublin excursion

1 year ago
25

After a depressing, emotional and physically draining day in Treblinka and then Parczew we arrived in Lublin at around 6.00pm the same day.
Lublin was the heart of the Jewish Lubavitch movement in south eastern Poland.
The city had a rich history of extensive Jewish life for many hundreds of years. The nazis knew this fact very well. Many of the surrounding smaller towns like my mother's Parczew were essentially satellite town of the Lublin Jewish hub.
Our ride took a little over an hour from Parczew to the city center of Lublin and an older Novatel Hotel which came up on my Garmin GPS. There was no underground parking here so we parked close to the stairs leading to the main entrance.
We booked a room as we did each day and promptly shlepped our hideously heavy bags into the foyer and ultimately to our room a number of floors up in the lobby elevator.
After being thoroughly worn out we had showers and crashed straight into bed. We spoke a little about the days events and realised more and more that we needed to gather our strength for the next morning when our excursion was to only one destination.
The plan was to leave the hotel early so we could spend time exploring a place of unspeakable horrors. Then return to the hotel to pick up our bags, check out and continue on to the next leg of our journey in Poland.
In the early morning the sun was warming our bike covers. It had rained a little over night but the roads were dry and our bike covers were almost dried from the early morning sun.
A very friendly front desk receptionist at the hotel knew we were from Australia and spoke excellent English. She offered me a variety of day tours to ensure she would receive her kick backs from the individual tour operators. There are indeed many very tourist worthy destinations in the city of Lublin so her attempts at luring us to undertake one of the many tours was impressive. She was doing her job very well and in some ways I respected her for that.
How was she to know the purpose of our stop in Lublin?
She realised very quickly what that was when I interrupted her sales pitch and asked her for directions to the Death Camp Majdanek.

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