On July 4, 1944, a German anmmunition train was stationary at the Belzec railway station when it was bombed by a lone Soviet fighter plane. In the ensuing explosion the station was completely destroyed, along with a number of other buildings in the vicinity. After the fires had been put out, the Germans erected a wooden barrack near the ruins that served as the station for the next fifty years, until a new one was built in 1994. The destruction of the railway station may well be the reason why no railroad documentation of the transports to Belzec has apparently survived.
The Soviet Red Army liberated Belzec village on July 21, 1944, and a Polish War Crimes Commission, led by Judge Czeslaw Godzieszewski from the District Court in Zamosc, commenced its investigations at the former death camp site. In addition to hearing testimony from the Belzec villagers, including those who had helped construct the gas chambers, and others who witnessed transports arriving, the investigation team carried out on-site investigations at the former death camp. Nine pits were opened to confirm the existence of mass graves. The human remains found were reinterred in a specially erected concrete crypt near the northeast corner of the camp. In February 1946, officials from the District Court Zamosc returned to Belzec to interview several of the witnesses again, and the War Crimes Commission published a report on their findings on April 11, 1946.
The first monument to the victims who perished at Belzec was unveiled on December 1, 1963, but the site was neglected and rarely visited. In 1993 an agreement was reached between Poland and the United States of America concerning the construction of a new memorial at the site of the former death camp. Among the signatories were members of the Council for the Preservation of the Memory of Victims of War and Persecutions and members of the American Jewish Community.
During the years 1997 and 1999, the site of the former death camp saw a number of archeological studies under the stewardship of Professor Andrzej Kola, director of the archaeological faculty at the Nicholas Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. They located 33 mass graves, most containing crematory ashes and charcoal, as well as a number of traces of the camps buildings and unloading ramps. The team also uncovered plastic plates with the Jewish Star of David, glass and china destructs, spoons, knives, keys and padlocks, and a silver cigarette case bearing the engraved inscription “Max Munk, Wien 27.”
The new memorial took the form of a symbolic cemetery designed by Polish artists Andrzej Solyga, Zdislaw Pidek, and Marcin Roszcyk. The entire area of the former camp, with its central part covered in slag and marked mass graves, constitutes a monument with a passage through it that symbolises the last stage of life. At the end of the passage there is a wall with names of over 200 Jewish communities whose members were murdered at Belzec. The memorial museum is built in the shape of a train entering the camps unloading ramp. The memorial museum was opened on June 3, 2004, by the Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski. He was accompanied by representatives from the Polish government, the American Jewish Committee, and the United States Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C., United States of America.
It is a fitting memorial to the hell called Belzec.