In the fall of 1943, the Germans decided to kill all Jews in the three camps of the Lublin District in Poland. This campaign of murder was given the euphemistic name of “Operation Harvest Festival” (“Aktion Erntefest”). On November 3, 18-20,000 Jews were massacred at Majdanek and a slightly higher number were slain at two nearby labor camps. Even given the enormity of the Holocaust, few if any massacres on this scale occurred in such a brief span of time. Among the prisoners at Majdanek at the time of the massacre was a young Pole, Joseph Giebultowicz. Since he was a political prisoner, rather than a Jew, he was spared, and although he suffered greatly in the camps he survived the war, and eventually came to America. Years later, he communicated to his son, Tomasz, what he had witnessed at Majdanek on November 3, 1943.
On April 18, 2014, Tomasz, a member of the Physics faculty at Oregon State University, discussed Operation Harvest Festival and reviewed what his father told him of that massacre.
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