Majdanek, Baltics, Ethiopia

Hello subscribers!

Many of us will have had quite warm weather lately, so I picked an image to serve as the featured photo above that may have a little cooling appeal. It was taken at the concentration camp memorial of Majdanek near Lublin in eastern Poland and featured in the latest new post on the DT Blog. This went up on Friday, to mark the 77th anniversary of the liberation of Majdanek by the Red Army in 1944, making it the first of the major camps to fall into Allied hands and reveal to the world the scope of the horrors of these places.

The photo above was taken in late March 2008, during my very first field trip to Poland, when a sudden wintery spell covered everything in a layer of snow. I’ve been back to Poland a few times over the years and I’m now planning yet another return trip, this time only to Warsaw and especially to Lublin, which is to serve as the base from which to make the excursion to the new memorial and museum of Sobibor as well as to a few smaller sites I haven’t yet been to. And maybe I can slot in re-visiting Majdanek as well. That trip will be from mid to late August.

But before that, the Baltics are beckoning, where I’ll be from Tuesday, first in Riga, then for five nights in Tallinn, and then back via Riga to Vienna on the 4th. On this trip a number of reworked or new sites of DT interest await inspection. But it’s also supposed to be a not 100% dark trip and will include some nice food & drink and relaxation – especially on my birthday on Sunday 1st of August. Please NOTE that this is also the reason why there will be no newsletter next Sunday!

The ring finger on my left hand (operated on more than five weeks ago) is very slowly getting a tiny little bit better, but is still very far from recovered, so really I shouldn’t overdo it with typing.

Just one more thing, though, a follow-up to the 9 July blog post: Developments in Ethiopia continue to surprise and disturb. Now the resurging Tigrayans have apparently attacked the Afar region to the east, forcing tens of thousands of Afar civilians to flee. So the conflict, which had begun in November last year with the attack by government forces on Tigray, is indeed clearly spreading. The Tigrayans seem to be trying to get into a good position, controlling the vital railway line to the coast (in Djibouti) that runs through the Afar region before taking on the Amhara region to the south, whose militias have aligned themselves with the federal government. This has the potential to break the multi-ethnic country of Ethiopia apart. It will certainly remain interesting, if not in a particularly uplifting way, to keep monitoring the further developments in that part of the world …

But with that I’ll come to a close for this newsletter. More in two (!) weeks’ time.

Until then, have a good fortnight and, as always, stay safe.

Best,

Peter