82nd Anniversary of "Atkion Erntefest"

On 3 November 2025, together with former prisoners of Majdanek and other camps, young people, representatives of local authorities and organisations, we paid tribute to the victims of operation "Erntefest" – the largest execution in the history of German concentration camps.

The main point of the celebrations was a solemn ceremony of laying flowers and memorial stones at the execution pits. During the ceremony, students from Secondary School No. 19 in Warsaw read moving accounts of witnesses to the events of 82 years ago. A prayer for the murdered was said by Rabbi Małgorzata Kordowicz from the Jewish Religious Community in Warsaw and Father Wojciech Lemański.

A group of people dressed in winter clothes, some of them holding umbrellas above their heads, with the crematorium in the background.

Earlier, in our Visitor Service Centre, we held a lecture on the crimes committed in the labour camps in Trawniki and Poniatowa followed by a guided tour of the former German concentration camp KL Lublin.

A group of people in an auditorium, a presentation on the cinema screen: an aerial photograph and the caption: after the execution.

During Operation Erntefest, German SS and police officers shot a total of 42,000 Jewish women, children and men. The executions took place on 3 November at Majdanek and at the labour camp in Trawniki, and on 4 November 1943 at the labour camp in Poniatowa.