2025-01 Raynors Historical Collectible Auctions
Absentee bidding for this session ends on Sunday, January 26, 2025 at 10:00 AM EST.
The live portion of this session begins on Sunday, January 26, 2025 at 10:00 AM EST
The Bronze uncirculated medal, 2-3/4” diameter displays Geographic grid, a triangle with the inscription: LUBLI. Along the rim in Polish, “WYSTAWA. PAINTING. GRAPHICS. AND SCULPTURES. AGAINST. WAR. MAJDANEK. 79”/ The reverse, A pair of people with high raised arms against the background of the geographic grid. From the sides: 1939 - 1945. Barbed wire along the rim, OAX. In the semicircle below: September 2, 1939 KL STUTTHOF, May 9, 1945. Construction on the camp began in October 1941 with the arrival of about 2,000 Soviet prisoners of war. Most of the Soviet prisoners of war at Majdanek were too weak to work; virtually all were dead by February 1942. The SS also detailed Jewish forced laborers from the Lipowa Street camp, located in the center of Lublin, to help construct Majdanek. On December 11-12, 1941, the SS rounded up more than 300 Jews in the streets of Lublin and selected 150 of them as the first Jewish prisoners to be incarcerated in Majdanek. During January and February 1942, the SS and police selected Polish Jews from the Lublin ghetto and brought them to Majdanek for forced labor. In January and February 1942, the first non-Jewish Polish prisoners also arrived in Majdanek. The SS evacuated most of the prisoners to concentration camps further west during the spring of 1944. In late July 1944, as Soviet forces approached Lublin, the remaining camp staff hastily abandoned Majdanek, without fully dismantling the camp. Soviet troops first arrived at Majdanek during the night of July 22–23 and captured Lublin on July 24. Two figures of the number of Majdanek victims have usually been in use—360,000 or 235,000. Kranz, director of the Research Department of the State Museum at Majdanek, asserts that approximately 59,000 Jews and 19,000 people of other ethnic backgrounds, mostly Poles and Byelorussians, died there. Kranz published his estimate in the latest edition of the journal Zeszyty Majdanka.
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