Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (26 page)

Women suffered just as much as men. At the work camp of Potulice women were routinely raped, beaten and subjected to sexual sadism by camp staff. Perhaps worse, their children were separated from them, and were only allowed to see their mothers on Sundays for an hour or two. One witness even claims that this was part of a wider policy of removing children to Polonize them, just as the Nazis had tried to Germanize Polish children during the war – although it is likely that this is an emotional response to the pain of being separated from her own child for a year and a half.
⁶⁰
Other inmates of Potulice claim to have been made to undress while on work parties and buried in liquid manure, and even to have witnessed a guard catch a toad and shove it down a German prisoner’s throat until he choked to death.
⁶¹

Perhaps the most notorious Polish camp, however, was that at Łambinowice – or Lamsdorf, as it was known to its German occupants. This former POW camp was reopened in July 1945 as a forced-labour camp for German civilians awaiting expulsion from the new Poland. It was run by the twenty-year-old Czesław G
borski, ‘a depraved-looking Pole, who only made himself understood with kicks’.
⁶²

According to one of the first prisoners, the atrocities began almost immediately. On the evening after they arrived, he and forty others were woken and hounded out of their barracks into the camp yard, where they were forced to lie on the ground while the militiamen jumped on their backs. They then had to jog around the yard while being beaten with lashes and rifle butts. Anyone who fell to the ground was immediately set upon by groups of militiamen. ‘The next morning we buried fifteen men,’ claims this witness. ‘For several days afterwards I could move only with the greatest pain, my urine was mixed with blood, my heartbeat irregular. And fifteen men were in the ground.’
⁶³

When the first large transport of prisoners arrived a couple of days later, the atrocities continued. It was not only the Polish militia who indulged in the beatings, but also their German henchmen, particularly the ‘Camp senior’, a sadistic Volksdeutsch prisoner from Lubliniec (or Lublinitz in German) called Johann Fuhrmann. ‘Before my eyes he struck a baby dead, whose mother had pleaded for some soup for the child, which at Lamsdorf was supplied for the smallest children. Then he chased the woman, still clutching the tiny bloody body in her arms, lashing her across the yard … then he retired to his room with his “assistants” and polished off the meal soup meant for the infants.’
⁶⁴

According to the same witness, the camp guards became gradually more and more inventive in their sadism. For entertainment the camp commandant forced one of the men to climb a tree that stood in the yard and call out, ‘I’m a great big monkey’, while he and his guards laughed and took potshots at him until he eventually fell to the ground. Perhaps the most disgusting allegation by this witness is the description he gives of what happened to the women of the nearby village of Grüben (now Grabin in Poland). They were sent to exhume a mass grave that was discovered near the camp, in which the bodies of hundreds of Soviet soldiers had been buried by the Nazis after they had died in their prisoner-of-war camp. The women were not given gloves or any other protective clothing. It was summer, and the bodies, which were in an advanced state of decay, gave off an unbearable stench.

As the corpses lay out in the open, the women and girls were forced to lie face-down on top of these slimy and disgusting corpses. With their rifle butts the Polish militiamen shoved the faces of their victims deep into the hellish decay. In this way human remains were squashed into their mouths and noses. Sixty-four women and girls died as a consequence of this ‘heroic’ Polish deed.
⁶⁵

The validity of accounts like this is impossible to verify, and it is quite likely that some aspects have been greatly exaggerated. However, photos survive of the exhumation, and even Polish historians concede that the women were forced to undertake it without gloves or protective clothing.
⁶⁶
Many of the details are also corroborated by other survivors of the camp. A female prisoner claimed that her son Hugo was also forced to exhume dead bodies with his bare hands, and that the decay was so bad that its slime soaked through his shoes.
⁶⁷

That a culture of casual sadism existed at Lambinowice is undeniable. Several witnesses attest to having seen people being beaten to death, or shot in reprisal for escape attempts.
⁶⁸
Punishments were certainly meted out for the most trivial of transgressions, such as expressing a desire to flee to the American zone of Germany (for which one teenager was allegedly beaten to death), or speaking to a member of the opposite sex.
⁶⁹
One woman claims that she cried out in joy when she discovered her husband alive in the camp, and as a consequence the two of them were tied down facing the sun for three days as a punishment.
⁷⁰

Alongside this culture of violence, prisoners were forced to endure the most terrible physical conditions. As in other camps they were given very little food – usually just a couple of boiled potatoes twice a day, and thin broth at lunchtime. Hygiene was non-existent, and even the sheets that were used to wrap the dead had to be reused, as did the palliasses in the hospital.
⁷¹
According to one of the camp gravediggers, the lice on the corpses he buried were sometimes ‘2cm thick’.
⁷²
Unsurprisingly, as elsewhere the biggest killers in the camp were the twin evils of sickness and malnutrition. According to Polish sources, 60 per cent of the deaths here were caused by typhus, with many more brought about by spotted fever, dysentery, scabies and other diseases.
⁷³

For those who survived the camp, its memory was like a vision of hell. By the time they were released and transported to Germany, they had lost their homes, all their possessions, their health, and sometimes up to half their body weight – but it was the psychological burden of bereavement that weighed on them most. As one woman explained a couple of years after her ordeal:

In the camp I lost my ten-year-old daughter, my mother, my sister, my brother, two sisters-in-law and a brother-in-law. Near death myself, I managed to join a transport to West Germany with my other daughter and my son. We spent fourteen weeks in the camp. Over half of the people of my village were dead … Full of longing, we awaited the arrival of my husband. In July 1946 the terrible news reached us that he too had become a victim of that hell-camp, as had so many after our departure …
⁷⁴

Such stories have since become part of Germany’s collective memory. Whole libraries of books have been written using them as a basis – as a consequence our view of the Polish work camps has remained impressionistic. As I hope to show next, despite the best efforts of the German government to gather statistics, good, hard facts on precisely how many people were interned in these camps, and how many died in them, are extremely hard to come by.

The Politics of Numbers

One of the most famous incidents at Lamsdorf was the fire that broke out in one of the barracks in October 1945. Nobody knows exactly how the blaze started, but the chaotic events that ensued have been well documented. According to German eyewitnesses, the camp guards used the occasion as an excuse to begin a massacre. They opened fire indiscriminately, killing many of those who were merely trying to put the blaze out, and then began to throw prisoners headlong into the flames. In the aftermath of the blaze the prisoners were forced to dig mass graves. The bodies of patients who had been recovering in the sick ward were also buried around this time: some of them were shot first, but many were merely beaten unconscious and buried alive.
⁷⁵

When the Polish Communist government was presented with these stories in 1965 they flatly denied them. According to their version of events, after the fire had broken out the prisoners had taken the opportunity to start an uprising, which the Polish guards had been obliged to suppress with force. The government steadfastly supported the camp commandant, Czesław G
borski, and claimed that he was innocent of all the charges raised against him. Furthermore, they claimed that such stories were merely propaganda created by a German political lobby whose only aim was to discredit Poland and force the return of those lands that were granted to Poland in the Potsdam Agreement in 1945.
⁷⁶

The argument about how many people had died during and after this fire was equally fierce. The lowest number given is just nine (according to a man who buried their bodies, and conceded even by the postwar Polish Communist authorities).
⁷⁷
However, some German witnesses claim that this is a massive underestimate. The German camp doctor, Heinz Esser, claimed that G
borski deliberately made him move the bodies to three separate locations in order to prevent them being counted properly, and that women and children were made to dig graves for them away from the official gravedigging parties. Esser kept a secret list of the fire victims according to different categories: those killed in the fire itself, those shot around the fire, those buried alive during the aftermath, and those who died of their injuries in the following days. He gives the final death toll as 581. Unfortunately, this number contradicts the figure apparently given by Esser several years earlier, when he claimed that only 132 people died.
⁷⁸
Given the unreliability of first-hand accounts, the absence of proper documents and the highly charged political atmosphere that prevailed after the war, it is impossible to say how many people actually did die at Lamsdorf on that day. The difference between nine deaths and over five hundred is huge. (At the trial of Czesław G
borski, the camp commandant, in 2000 the number of people said to have died in and around this fire was forty-eight.
⁷⁹
)