Majdanek Camp Museum, Shoes Display, Picture Page

Shoes, Majdanek
Camp Museum

At the Majdanek extermination camp in Lublin, Poland, shoes of former prisoners are on display in a former wooden barracks. A report by Time-Life correspondent Richard Lauterbach described the shoe warehouse at Majdanek after its liberation in 1944: "I stepped up and went inside. It was full of shoes. A sea of shoes. I walked across them unsteadily. They were piled, like pieces of coal in a bin, halfway up the walls. Not only shoes. Boots. Rubbers. Leggings. Slippers. Children's shoes, soldier's shoes, old shoes, new shoes. They were red and grey and black. Some had once been white.-- a barracks filled from the floor to the ceiling with old, smelling shoes."