Central Labour Camp Jaworzno

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

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

[edit] Nazi period

Opened on June 15, 1943, as a subcamp of KL Auschwitz in Jaworzno, the SS-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 for the Energie Versorgung Oberschlesien AG company), 1,600 to 5,000 inmates at a time.

The prisoners were mostly Polish Jews until late 1943, then ethnic Poles and Soviet POWs. Conditions were lethal and the reported survival rate low; every month about 200 Muzulman were driven out to the Birkenau gas chambers. There were 14 escapes.

On the night of January 15, 1945, the camp was bombed by the Soviet Air Force. On January 17, 1945, during the evacuation of the camp, the SS guards executed some 40 prisoners unfit for transport, leaving about 400 alive, and marched away the remaining 3,200. Hundreds of them died on the way to the Buchenwald concentration camp, including about 300 shot dead in a massacre which occurred during 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 when the Red Army arrived a week later.

[edit] Communist period

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 "Central Labour Camp."

On April 23, 1947, a decree of the Political Bureau of Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party transformed it into a concentration camp for Lemko and Ukrainian civilians selected for detention during the mass deportation operation 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 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. About 15% of those captured in the operation are estimated to have died in the camp.^[1]

The prisoners mostly worked 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, unsanitary conditions, exhaustive work, and hunger, including 5,100 in 1945 and 900 in 1947. The Lemko and Ukrainian prisoners were gradually released from the spring of 1948 until the spring of 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" who perished in the Central Labour Camp on the previously unmarked site of a mass grave of 162 persons.

[edit] See also

• Central Labour Camp Potulice
• Ukrainian Canadian internment
• Ukrainian Austrian internment

[edit] External links

• Roman Drozd, "Явожно– трагічний символ акції «Вісла»" (in Ukrainian; "Jaworzno - the tragic symbol of Wisła Action") in "Наше слово" weekly magazine, No. 18, 2004
• Arkadiusz Kwieciński, "Śledztwo w sprawie zbrodni popełnionych w Centralnym Obozie Pracy w Jaworznie na obywatelach polskich narodowości ukraińskiej" (in Polish), Biuletyn IPN Nr 8, 2001
• The institute of National Remembrance