Central Labour Camp Jaworzno

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Central Labour Camp Jaworzno memorial

Central Labour Camp Jaworzno (Polish: Centralny Obóz Pracy w Jaworznie) was a concentration camp in Jaworzno, Poland. It was operating from 1943 until 1956.

1 Nazi period
2 Communist period
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Nazi period

Labour Camp Neu-Dachs memorial

Opened on June 15, 1943 as a subcamp of KL Auschwitz in Jaworzno, the Arbeitslager Neu-Dachs Nazi concentration camp provided forced labour for various German companies (coal mining in the Jaworzno mines and construction of the Wilhelm power plant, company: Energie Versorgung Oberschlesien AG), 1,600 to 5,000 inmates at the time. The prisoners were mostly Polish Jews until late 1943, and then ethnic Poles and Soviet POWs. Conditions were lethal and survival rate reported low; every month about 200 Muzulman were being driven out to the Birkenau gas chambers. There were 14 escapes.

On the night of 15 January–16 January, the camp was bombed. On 17 January 1945, during the evacuation of the camp, SS guards executed some 40 prisoners unfit for transport, leaving about 400 alive, and marched away 3,200. Hundreds of them died on the way to the Buchenwald concentration camp, including about 300 shot dead in a massacre during which occured this death march.

The abandoned camp was liberated on January 19, 1945, by the Polish resistance soldiers from the local Armia Krajowa company; some 350 prisoners remained alive at the time the Red Army arrived a week later.

[edit] Communist period

Jaworzno memorial plate in the German language

Jaworzno memorial plate in the Ukrainian language

Since February 1945, the camp initially served the NKVD and then MBP as a prison camp for Nazi collaborators from all of Poland and thousands of local German, Volksdeutsche and Silesian civilians from Jaworzno, Chrzanow and elsewhere in Silesia. Other prisoners included members of the AK and BCh non-communist and WiN anti-communist Polish resistance organizations. The camp was soon renamed to "Central Labour Camp."

On April 23, 1947, a decree of Political Bureau of Central Committee of Polish Workers' Party transformed it into a concentration camp for Lemko and Ukrainian civilians selected for detention during the mass deportation operation codenamed "Wisła". The first transport of 17 Operation Wisła prisoners reached the camp on May 5, 1947 from Sanok. The number of these prisoners until March 1949 totalled to 3,936—3,760 of them arrived in 1947 alone—including 823 women and dozens of children. Most of the prisoners at that time were Lemko intelligentsia, people suspected of sympathy towards Ukrainian Insurgent Army, priests and people otherwise selected by Polish communist forces from Operation Wisła transports.

The prisoners were mostly working at the construction of the then-built Jaworzno power plant or in other nearby factories and mines. Altogether about 7,000 people died 1945–47 as a result of torture, inhuman treatment, anti-sanitary conditions, exhaustive work, and hunger, including 5,100 in 1945 and 900 in 1947. The Lemko and Ukrainian prisoners were gradually released from spring 1948 until spring 1949, when the last of them left the camp. The camp continued to be used for Polish political prisoners, including many children, until 1956.

On April 15, 1996, the Polish authorities started an official investigation of the crimes committed in the camp against Polish citizens of Ukrainian ethnic descent. In 1998, Polish and Ukrainian Presidents Aleksander Kwasniewski and Leonid Kuchma erected a memorial to the "victims of Communist terror" perished in the Central Labour Camp on the previously unmarked site of a mass grave of 162 persons.