I spent several weeks in Lublin and also visited the region around it. I went to Himmlerstadt, formerly Zamosc, an excentric Renaissance gem built ex nihilo at the end of the sixteenth century by a rather megalomaniac Polish chancellor. The city had flourished thanks to its advantageous position on the commercial routes between Lublin and Lemberg and between Cracow and Kiev. It was now the heart of the most ambitious project of the RKF, the SS organization in charge, since 1939, of ensuring the repatriation of the Volksdeutschen from the USSR and the Banat, thus bringing about the Germanization of the East: the creation of a Germanic buffer region on the threshold of the Slavic regions, confronting eastern Galicia and Volhynia. I discussed the details of this with Globocnik’s delegate, a bureaucrat from the RKF who had his headquarters in the town hall, a tall baroque tower by the side of the square, its entrance on the upper story reached by a majestic, crescent-moon-shaped double staircase. From November to March, he explained to me, more than a hundred thousand people had been expelled—the able-bodied Poles sent to German factories via the Aktion Sauckel, the others to Auschwitz, and all the Jews to Belzec. The RKF aimed to replace them with Volksdeutschen; but despite all the incentives and the natural wealth of the region, they were having trouble attracting enough settlers. When I asked him if our setbacks in the East discouraged them—this conversation took place in the beginning of July; the great battle of Kursk had just begun—this conscientious administrator looked at me with surprise and assured me that not even the Volksdeutschen were defeatist, and that, in any case, our brilliant offensive would soon reestablish the situation and bring Stalin to his knees. This optimistic man did, though, allow himself to talk about the local economy with some discouragement: despite the subsidies, the region was still far from self-sufficient, and depended entirely on money and food inputs from the RKF; most of the settlers, even the ones who had taken immediate possession of entire working farms, weren’t managing to feed their families; and as for the ones who wanted to set up enterprises, it would take them years to stay afloat. After this visit, I was driven by Piontek south of Himmlerstadt: it was a beautiful region, made of gentle hills with meadows and copses, dotted with fruit trees; it already looked more Galician than Polish, with rich fields spread out beneath a light blue, unvarying sky, broken only here and there by little puffs of white clouds. Out of curiosity, I went on to Belzec, one of the last towns before the district’s border. I stopped near the train station, where there was some bustle: cars and wagons moved up and down the main street, officers from various branches, as well as settlers in threadbare suits, were waiting for a train, farmers who looked more Romanian than German were selling apples on upturned crates by the side of the road. Beyond the track stood brick warehouses, a kind of small factory; and just behind, a few hundred meters farther on, thick black smoke rose up from a birch wood. I showed my papers to an SS noncom standing there and asked him where the camp was: he pointed to the wood. I got back into the car and traveled about three hundred meters on the main road alongside the railway toward Rawa Ruska and Lemberg; the camp stood on the other side of the tracks, surrounded by a forest of pine and birch. They had put tree branches in the barbed-wire fence, to hide the interior; but some of them had already been removed, and one could see through these gaps teams of prisoners, busy as ants, tearing down barracks and, in places, the fence itself; the smoke came from a hidden zone, a little higher up in the back of the camp; despite the lack of wind, a sweetish, nauseating smell made the air reek, and spread even into the car. After everything I had been told and shown, I had thought that the camps of the Einsatz were set up in uninhabited areas, difficult to access; but this one was right next to a little town swarming with German settlers and their families; the main railroad linking Galicia to the rest of the GG, on which civilians and soldiers traveled daily, passed right by the barbed wire, through the horrible smell and the smoke: and all these people, trading, traveling, scurrying in one direction or another, chatted, argued, wrote letters, spread rumors, told jokes.
