Death camp dig unearths defiant Jews' belongings

A CHILD'S ring. Twisted reading glasses. A few gold coins... scraps of personal dignity, hurriedly buried in a last act of defiance to keep them from falling into Nazi hands.

Israeli archaeologists, helped by Holocaust survivors, are writing a new chapter in the terrible history of the German death camp at Majdanek, Poland, by excavating grounds long thought to be empty.

Their findings show how doomed Jews furiously dug into the grassy ground with their hands to bury what personal possessions they had with them before they were murdered in the camp's gas chambers.

The objects are not worth much financially but "the value as a human story is immeasurable", said Yaron Svoray, an Israeli journalist.

"This is where the testimony led us," said Matt Mazer, the American who organised the project. "We get to reconstruct a crime scene of one of the greatest crimes of humanity."

Barbed-wire fences now surround empty fields and the few barracks still standing at the camp where around 235,000 people died. The crematorium's brick smokestack stands on a small hill.

People occasionally cross the camp on their way to the adjacent Roman Catholic cemetery, unaware of what the ground holds.

For two years, Mr Svoray collected survivor testimony and researched the site. He teamed up with Mr Mazer to form Historical Media Associates, and with private financial backing from America came to the camp to dig. Four Majdanek survivors now living in Australia accompanied them.

It turned out that Majdanek's Middle Field 2, which in 1943 had been a gently sloping stretch of grass, still had stories to tell.

In the spring of 1943, around 15,000 Jews from the destroyed Warsaw Ghetto arrived in the camp on the outskirts of the eastern Polish city of Lublin. The camp administration could not process the sudden influx, so they were dumped in the fenced-in field to await "selection" - separation of those to be immediately killed from those to be starved, beaten and worked to death.

"To their horror, on the far right side there is a gas chamber and on the far left side there is a crematorium. It's rather obvious what is going to happen," Mr Svoray said. And so they dug "with their fingers or with a spoon or something else."

The team of amateur archaeologists found the first item - a semi-precious stone for a ring - towards the end of the first day. By the end of the three-day dig they had collected more than 50 items.

Mr Mazer said he plans to return in the spring, but feels the dig has already made an important contribution to the camp's history, and more generally the Holocaust, during which six million Jews died.