May 30, 2025 – Zamość to Rybczewice – 67 kms – Apartamenty Mieszkaniowe Kadrena 

May 31, 2025 – Rybczewice to Lublin – 43 kms – Fontana Boutique Apartments 

Ruth: In 1848, at age nine, my Jewish Great Great Grandmother Wilhelmina (Mina) Taussig left her home in Prague and travelled to North America with her parents and siblings. Her father, Juda Low Taussig, was a liberal thinker who was at odds with the Hapsburg authorities during the Prague upheavals in the same year. The family landed in New York and then settled in St. Louis, far away from the horrors that would come during the Second World War. 

Yesterday we visited the concentration and extermination camp of Majdanek. Built in plain view in the suburbs of the city of Lublin, there was no mistaking its purpose. Many buildings have been preserved or recreated to give a grim impression of what life inside the camp would have been like. 

Majdanek had 7 gas chambers and 227 structures, making it one of the largest Nazi extermination camps. Under Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan to exterminate all Jews in Poland, the camp became a mass scale killing facility. Few Jews survived the camp to tell their stories. The scale of the death and inhumanity was staggering.

I stumbled on a Jewish archive that included a story of another Taussig family from Prague. Many of them did not survive the holocaust and ended up being killed in Auschwitz, but one member: Inglelbourg Taussig (1921-1942), died at Majdanek.  Her twin sister Hildegard (1921-1989) survived Auschwitz and later escaped with another girl from a death march and lived in hiding until the end of the war. She later immigrated to the United States. 

An American woman who moved to Canada during Trump’s first term explained to me that her decision was informed by the stories she heard while she was working in what is now the Czech Republic. She said that whether it was under the Nazi or Soviets, the people who recognized the rise of authoritarianism and left early were the lucky ones. She had always kept in mind a list of twenty conditions on the road to authoritarianism, and made the decision that if five of these were met she would leave. She explained that five of those conditions were met even before Trump’s first inauguration. I am so grateful that my ancestors similarly sensed the risk left Prague when they did. 

A gas chamber.

Zyklon B canisters

450,000 shoes.

The twins as children.

Today we cycled out of town to an open air museum with a wonderful collection of historic houses and buildings from all over the region. 

Lublin