Reader's
letter in the Jewish Chronicle
Friday,
September 4, 1998
Archaeology
of the Belzec camp I
WAS INTERESTED to read the comments about
the Belzec extermination camp (JC August 7
and subsequent letters). I
have recently returned from a two-month
investigation at Belzec, where I was part
of an archaeological team, surveying the
camp site with a view to the erection of a
more appropriate memorial. Essentially,
our job was to locate any mass graves in
order for them to be identified as
memorial sites in any future
construction. We
in fact identified 33 mass graves, the
largest of which measured 50 metres x 30
metres x 6 metres deep. Further,
we are of the opinion that well over
800,000 Jews were murdered in Beizec, far
higher than the number suggested by the
Soviet commission of inquiry in
1946. As
mentioned by your Polish correspondent and
readers, the site is in a deplorable state
and is used for evening drinking sessions
by local villagers who obtain their liquor
very cheaply from over the
Ukrainian/Polish border.  We
excavated five original buildings
(barracks) and recovered over 600 items of
property, including a silver cigarette
case inscribed with the name Max Monk,
Vienna.
|
2.
I
have almost certainly identified Max Monk
as a Jew born in Vienna in 1882, who was
taken from Prague to Theresienstadt on
December 17, 1941, on transport "N" and
later transported to Piaski on transport
"Ag" on April 1, 1942. We know that
transports left for Sobibor and Belzec on
November 11, 1942. If this is our Max, we
have the first direct evidence that Jews
from Vienna were murdered in
Belzec. It
may also be of interest that the latest
favoured memorial design is based on the
Western Wall in Jerusalem. It is proposed
to bring original stones from Jerusalem
and place them as the central feature of
the memorial. Whether we can overcome the
rampant anti-Semitism is another matter.
Overnight, our excavation sites were
vandalised, and holes dug, no doubt by
people looking for "Jewish
gold.' Finally,
this was not a very pleasant task and at
times it was very difficult for the team
to cope with our findings. We carried out
over 1,700 bore drillings and each
borehole was immediately replaced with the
extracted soil samples. None of the team
was Jewish but, after each day's work, I
read an English translation of the
Kaddish. We did our best in all the
circumstances, and what we thought was
right. Robin
O'Neil, Church Furlong, Stapleford,
Salisbury. |
THERE IS something vaguely
surreal about the picture of archeologists
raking over, sinking boreholes, and
digging up the sites of the "Nazi
factories of death" with an almost
Egyptological fervor, already seeking to
find, barely fifty years after the event,
hard evidence of hideous crimes which
should have been easily provable by other
means decades ago. Have the Revisionists
already done such harm to the legends?
We have reported
elsewhere
[AR#14] on the commendable
researches conducted by Mr Robin
O'Neil. Why at Belzec:  why
not at Auschwitz,
where there would be so much of interest
to seek: the mass graves there, the
burning pits, the crematoria/gas-chambers,
even the foundations of the "bunkers" -
the two cottages in the woods where the
initial gassings were allegedly carried
out. Instead, they have started with
Belzec, most unprepossessing of the sites.
We shall keep our visitors informed of the
progress. |
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