Memorial to the Victims of the Forced Labour Camp Trawniki
Pomnik dla Ofiar Byłego Obozu Pracy Przymusowej
A memorial in the small town of Trawniki, located about forty kilometres south-east of Lublin, honours the thousands of Jewish forced labourers held here from 1942 on and murdered during »Aktion Erntefest« (»Operation Harvest Festival«) in 1943.
History
The small town of Trawniki lies close to Lublin in eastern Poland. In the autumn of 1941, Lublin SS and police leader Odilo Globocnik had an SS training camp established on the premises of a former sugar plant in Trawniki. There the SS trained »Hilfswillige« (»volunteer auxiliaries«), including »Volksdeutsche« (German nationals) from Eastern Europe and anti-communist Soviet prisoners of war, especially Ukrainians. The SS deployed these men, referred to as »Trawniki men«, as concentration camp guards, in mass shootings of Jews or in anti-partisan warfare. In total, between 4,000 and 5,000 men were trained at the Trawniki camp, which was dismantled only in the summer of 1944.
At the end of 1942, the SS also set up a forced labour camp on the premises of the old sugar plant in Trawniki. Almost all of the forced labourers at the camp were Polish Jews. The nearby training facility provided the guards for the camp. At the end of 1941, a brush factory from the Międzyrzec Podlaski ghetto was transferred to the Trawniki camp along with several hundred of its forced labourers. In early 1943, the Fritz Schultz company relocated about 5,600 Jewish forced labourers from the Warsaw ghetto, where they had produced textiles for the Wehrmacht, to Trawniki. Among them were many members of the underground resistance movement in the Warsaw ghetto, including Emanuel Ringelblum, who had led the underground archives. The Jews continued to work for the Schultz company in Trawniki until the camp was dissolved in November 1943 during »Operation Harvest Festival« and its prisoners were shot by SS units: On November 3, 1943, members of the SS and SD surrounded the forced labour camp and gradually brought the Jews to the premises of the SS training camp, where they were forced to undress and climb into a prepared ditch. All of the approximately 6,000 forced labourers, including women and children, were shot by SS men. Their bodies were subsequently burned.
Victims
About 6,000 Jewish forced labourers were shot in Trawniki in November 1943. A small group came from the Międzyrzec Podlaski ghetto; the majority - about 5,600 Jews - came from the Warsaw ghetto.
The Second World War began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the occupation of the west of the country by German troops and the east of the country by the Red Army. Persecution and terror directly followed the invasion in both parts of the country. German units massacred members of the intelligentsia, Jewish and non-Jewish civilians as well as hospital patients.
At the end of 1939 the German administration established ghettos where the Jewish population was forced to live in cramped and horrendous conditions. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, eastern Poland also fell under German control. SS Einsatzgruppen started to systematically murder Jewish men, later also women and children. In autumn 1941, local German authorities in the former west of the country began to prepare for the mass murder of Jewish ghetto prisoners using poison gas. By 1945, some three million Polish Jews had been murdered in the extermination camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek or Auschwitz, starved to death in the ghettos or shot dead. In 1943 the Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto staged an uprising, which was brutally crushed by the SS.
Polish soldiers fought with the Allies on all fronts during the Second World War. Polish partisan groups, including the patriotic »Armia Krajowa« (Home Army), formed the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe. August 1, 1944 saw the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the most extensive civilian campaign against the Germans in occupied Europe. It failed also because the Red Army, already standing on the opposite side of the Vistula River, chose not to intervene. It is estimated that up to 250,000 people lost their lives in the uprising. A total of around three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death during the German occupation.
Once the Red Army had arrived on (East) Polish soil in January 1944, the troops of the Armia Krajowa were stripped of their weapons by the Soviet secret service and the officers were either shot or deported. The millions of deaths during the occupation, the permanent Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the incorporation of former eastern German territories and the ensuing population transfers all left a traumatic political and social legacy in Poland.
Remembrance of the murder of European Jews in German extermination camps was initially marginalised in the Polish culture of memory. Although Auschwitz soon became an international symbol of the Holocaust, in Poland it was viewed for decades above all as a »site of Polish martyrdom«. However, the start of the 21st century brought about changes in this respect, due in part to the fierce debates over the Jedwabne massacre in eastern Poland. The massacre of around 340 Jews on July 10, 1941 was originally attributed to the »Gestapo and Hitler police« but had in fact been carried out by Polish »neighbours« without orders from the Germans. Debates in Poland and abroad on Polish perpetration resulted in the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (*1954) issuing an apology to the victims in 2001. There were increasing calls from experts, such as those from Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance, for the country to confront the most difficult chapters in its history, which also include the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1946-47 and state anti-semitism in communist Poland during the post-war period.
The Polish invests extensively in memorial culture, including grand projects with international ambition. The Warsaw Rising Museum was opened already in 2004. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in 2013 on the territory of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new museum dedicated specifically to the Warsaw Ghetto will follow suit in 2024. Since 2017, there is a major Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Since the turn of the millennium, the sites of the former German extermination camps have also been converted into modern memorial sites. An ever-growing preoccupation with Poland’s Jewish and multicultural heritage can be observed in the field of culture as well.
Remembrance
Many of the former camp buildings remain intact, however, they are not publicly accessible as the premises are private property. In the 1960s, a memorial to the murdered Jewish forced labourers was erected on the site of the November 1943 mass shootings, which were part of »Operation Harvest Festival«. The inscription on the pedestal does not refer to Jews, but to »victims of many nationalities«. Only in 2001 was the dedication altered, on the initiative of the Israeli David Efrati, a former prisoner of the Trawniki camp who had survived because a small group of Jewish prisoners were sent to the Majdanek concentration camp instead of being murdered during »Operation Harvest Festival«. The new inscription on the side of the monument now specifically identifies the victims as Jews.
