A lengthy letter from Eugenia Linicka of Moldova recently arrived at my home address (that is, from the Republic of Moldova, one of the states that emerged from the ruins of the USSR). Enclosed with the letter was a birth certificate issued by the German Registry Office in Bolesławiec. We read that “Genia Lenitzki” was born on 16 December 1944 in the local hospital. Her mother, Antonina, was a prisoner employed at the labor camp near today’s Ciesielska Street; Eugenia’s father was a prisoner employed at a factory located on the grounds of the labor camp in Szprotawa.
Here is a summary of her letter. Her mother, who was pregnant, was arrested by the Germans during a roundup in Ukraine and brought to Bolesławiec with a group of female prisoners. The camp stood near today’s Ciesielska Street, where there were factory buildings. Aircraft parts were manufactured underground there. Alongside Russians and Ukrainians, there were Poles, as well as Italian, French and other prisoners of war. Her mother is alive and is now 88 years old. Everything she writes about comes from her mother, who recounted her camp experiences many times.
In February 1945, when she was about six weeks old, the Germans transported all the prisoners westward into Germany because Soviet troops were approaching. “We walked through frost and snow, then travelled by rail. At our destination, near the end of the war, the camp guards wanted to shoot us all. Many fell to the bullets. Mother was wounded in the head and fell, and I fell with her, because she always kept me with her. A Polish woman saved me from the bullets: when she fell, she covered me with her body. She herself was wounded in both legs. I owe her my life. At the last moment—before everyone was murdered—we were liberated by British soldiers. Then we travelled home by rail. But Soviet troops took us to a camp in Bereza Kartuska in Polesia. We stayed there for a long time; they checked our political backgrounds to see whether we were traitors to our homeland... Then we returned home. I recently learned that this town is now called Bolesławiec. Please send some photographs, etc., and do not forget about us.”
I sent her a thick file of photographs, maps and brochures about our town. We must keep in touch with her. Perhaps we should invite her? We will see what she replies to my letter.
This fact prompts reflections on the Nazi camps in our town. The occasion is especially appropriate because the anniversary of the town’s return to the Motherland is approaching! The town and county of Bolesławiec were unlucky when it came to documenting the history of these camps. The Provincial Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Wrocław gathered only very limited material concerning our county. The commission’s secretary, a woman judge of the Provincial Court in Wrocław whose name I no longer remember, came to Bolesławiec. She spoke with the county commandant of the Citizens’ Militia and the county prosecutor, and left notes intended to help trace the history of these camps. Yet the area of the Lower Silesian Forests north of Bolesławiec, from Lipiany and Krzyżowa to Gromadka and beyond, contained an entire town of camp barracks, where prisoners and prisoners of war worked in slave-like conditions in the armaments industry (relocated from western and central Germany because of increasingly intense air raids).
People who had been settled in Gromadka and Osiowa lived there and worked in those facilities. The judge provided their names. They should have been questioned. But for the Citizens’ Militia command and the prosecutor’s office, this was not an important matter. It was put off until later, and the years passed. Today, nothing more can be established. We will never learn the full truth about this exceptionally important matter.
As I write these words, I have before me a document of about 700 pages. It is the encyclopedic reference work “Nazi Camps in the Polish Lands,” published in 1979 by PWN. It was written by a team of researchers from the Main Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland. A black cloth binding, dry, brief sentences, figures behind which lie the tragedies of thousands and many thousands of people employed in slave-like, backbreaking conditions, their suffering and the slow deaths of so many...
There are many such places in Bolesławiec, but only one has a memorial boulder, funded for the town of Bolesławiec by scouts from the Wałbrzych Scout Banner when they took soil to an urn that was transported to the Gross Rosen death camp (Rogoźnica). On pages 113 and 428, the reference work contains incomplete information about the camps in Bolesławiec. And, strangely enough, it does not mention the labor camp located on the grounds of the present-day workplace—the Bolesławiec Vials and Ampoules Factory! Were there underground facilities there, as the Moldovan woman writes, in which an armaments factory was established—or not?
What camps and subcamps do we find in this reference work?
1) Two labor detachments consisting of prisoners of war from “Stalag VIII-a” in Zgorzelec. They were the so-called Kommandos 55 and 56. Their nationality, the number of people in the detachments, and where they were located and employed have not been established. It should be mentioned here that such “Kommandos” were found in almost every village in Bolesławiec County. They worked in agriculture, small-scale industry, gravel pits and so on.
2) A branch of the Gross Rosen extermination camp (Rogoźnica), established in 1940 and converted into a concentration-camp subcamp in May 1944—today at Staroszkolna Street, where scouts erected a memorial boulder. We do not know how many prisoners passed through the camp or what their nationalities were. They were employed at the large timber-production facility located there, where portable barracks, aircraft decoys placed on dummy airfields and gliders for the army were produced.
3) “Russenlager”—that is, a labor camp for prisoners from Eastern Slavic nations (such as our Moldovan woman?). The camp was located on Orla Street (today the “Concordia” technical textiles plant). Facilities producing aircraft parts were located there. The number of prisoners and the date the camp was established are unknown.
4) A branch of the Gross Rosen extermination camp (Rogoźnica), located, like the “Russenlager,” on the grounds of “Concordia.” The camp was established on 1 July 1944. Its average population was about 1,000 people. The prisoners worked at the local facility producing car parts and aircraft engines.
The reference work contains no information about the prisoner-of-war camp for Italian soldiers, several hundred of whom were in our town on 12 February, the day the town was occupied by Soviet troops.
On 10–11 February 1945, just before the fighting in the town, all the camps were evacuated to western Germany. It was a terrible march known as the death march, because prisoners driven westward through temperatures of about 25 degrees below zero and snowdrifts died like flies. The only known fact is that of approximately 1,000 prisoners from the camp mentioned in point 4, only 441 prisoners reached another death camp, Mittelbau-Dora, on 16 March, after a five-week march.
Why did the death march not include the Italian soldiers or a group of approximately 25 French prisoners? (In July they had been quartered—incidentally, on their own initiative—in one of the houses on Prusa Street, in a rear courtyard. Only a dozen or so years ago was a large French inscription painted over, saying that French soldiers were quartered there.)
We do not know where the prisoners who died or were murdered in Bolesławiec were buried, or how many victims there were. Six months ago, a German journalist from Berlin who worked for Canadian television visited our town. She had come to make a report about an event resembling the one shown in the film “Schindler’s List.” A group of Canadian Jews had asked her to do so. The head of the Gross Rosen branch camp on Staroszkolna Street, where the memorial boulder now stands, was apparently a humane SS man. When the death march began, he was supposed to murder all the Jews, young people who had arrived from Gross Rosen. He did not do so. They were evacuated westward, where British soldiers liberated them. The journalist could not understand why we knew nothing about this fact, why we could not help her, since she was trying to find or establish the SS man’s name. But what surprised her most was that we could not show her the graves of prisoners who had died or been murdered in Bolesławiec. They did die and were murdered—that fact was confirmed by Jewish survivors. We explained the matter to her at length. A few months later, she wrote to me from Berlin that she had been unable to make the film report as planned. But she had done something: she filmed images of the town and the camp buildings. They are long barracks and hangars needed for this type of timber production.