A View of the shoes of those murdered at Belzec
It was Established November 1, 1941. Belzec extermination center consisted of two camps divided into three parts: 1administration section, 2barracks and storage for plundered goods,3 and extermination section. Initially, there were three gas chambers using carbon monoxide housed in a wooden building. They were later replaced by six gas chambers in a brick and concrete building. Belzec extermination camp was quite small, with a circumference of +- 1,220 yards. It was divided into two sections, each one surrounded by a barbed wire fence. There were guard towers all around the main perimeter.
In mid-June, construction began on a brick and concrete building housing six gas chambers, each one 13 by 16 feet. This enabled the SS to kill up to 1,200 Jews at a time, which meant that trains needed to be broken down into only two parts.
Belzec extermination center began operations March 17, 1942, and ended operations December 1942. The estimated number of deaths is 500-600,000; mainly killing the Jews. The second phase, from mid-July 1942 to the end of December 1942, saw the arrival and gassing of 130,000 Jews from the Cracow area, 215,000 from the Lvov region and smaller numbers from Lublin and Radom.
During the early months of 1943, the corpses of the murdered Jews were disinterred and burned in open air pits. The camp was then closed.To deter other scavengers, the area of the camp was ploughed over and turned into a farm. One of the Ukrainian guards was made the farmer.
The second camp housed the gas chambers and burial pits. It was reached by a long, narrow passageway with barbed wire fencing on either side, known as 'the tube'. The extermination site was screened off from the rest of the camp by leafy branches intertwined with the barbed wire.
Men were separated from women and children and marched off to large huts where they undressed. Women had their hair shaven off. They were then brutally pushed to "the tube" and into the gas chambers which were disguised as "showers." The brutalized and disoriented Jews, often weak from hours or days spent in cattle trucks, had barely any time to evaluate their fate or react defensively. Once the gas chambers were filled and the doors shut, the killing process took up to 30 minutes.
Those remaining when the camp ceased to function were transported to Sobibor death camp and murdered. There were only a handful of survivors of Belzec.
It is estimated that about 600,000 Jews were murdered at Belzec and probably dozen thousands of Gypsies.