ABSTRACT
They took me up, up. Very far, maybe 300 miles, until we came to Lublin.
(Art Speigelman, Maus 1 )With the words cited above, in Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus (1980–1991), Holocaust survivor Vladek Spiegelman remembers his journey from Częstochowa to Lublin as a Jewish prisoner of war in 1941. The name of the city of Lublin resounds as a distant place on map of Europe during the Second World War and, insofar as the study of film and the Holocaust is concerned, Lublin has entirely slipped under the radar as an understudied subject of investigation. This article aims at filling this gap and discusses the role of this city in the Final Solution by means of a study of its cinematic image and that of the concentration and extermination camp of Majdanek, at the outskirts of Lublin.
