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© Yad Vashem 40 • Frank Grelka See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327748636 Rural Hubs of Early Destruction: The Waterworks’ Camps in the Lublin District, 1940-1942, in: Yad Vashem Studies, 45 (2) 2017, pp. 39-67. Article · March 2018 CITATIONS READS 0 179 1 author: Frank Grelka Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) 8 PUBLICATIONS 0 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE All content following this page was uploaded by Frank Grelka on 08 November 2018. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Rural Hubs of Early Destruction The Waterworks’ Camps in the Lublin District, 1940–19421 Frank Grelka Introduction rom the summer of 1940, Polish Jews from Warsaw and de- portees from Central Europe died en masse as forced-laborers in non-industrial labor camps on the periphery of occupied Poland. Roughly 15 to 30 kilometers from Sobibór, these camps Fwere established within the marshes around three inflows to the Bug River, and, a year and a half after their erection, they became connect- ed to the setting up of the extermination camp. Since the late Robert Kuwałek, in 2004, pointed to the lack of study about the Chełm-area labor camps, little research has been conducted on this subject. By examining the waterworks’ camps in Chełm county run by the Water Management Inspection (Wasserwirtschaftsinspektion) in the Lublin District,2 this article focuses on the non-industrial forced-labor camps for Jews as one aspect of the Generalgouvernement’s persecu- tion agenda through the use of space in occupied Poland.3 1 I had the good fortune of being able to carry out intensive archival research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem thanks to a fellowship from the International Institute for Holocaust Research. I also wish to thank Giles Bennett, Mark Keck-Szajbel and Jonathan Singerton for assistance in the final editing of this text. 2 These include Czerniejów, Dorohusk, Kamień, Krychów, Iłowa, Luta, Nowosiółki, Osowa, Ruda Opalin, Sawin, Siedliszcze, Staw-Sajczyce, Tomaszówka, Ujazdów, Włodawa and Żmudź; Józef Marszałek, Obozy pracy w Generalnym Guberna- torstwie w latach 1939–1945 (Lublin: Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, 1998), p. 41. 3 Report by the Generalgouvernement on the situation of the Jewish population, July 1940, in Tatiana Berenstein, Artur Eisenbach, and Adam Rutkowski, eds., Ekster- minacja Żydów na ziemiach polskich w okresie okupacji hitlerowskiej; zbior doku- mentów (Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute, 1957), pp. 86–88. 39 © Yad Vashem 40 • Frank Grelka On July 26, 1940, Dr. Ernst Gschliesser, deputy head of the Ar- beitsamt (Labor Office) of the Generalgouvernement, issued a decree implementing Jewish forced labor for the first time for all Jews.4 In the context of the planned resettlement of 67,000 Jews from Kraków,5 that order considerably escalated the effects of decrees that had been issued in December 1939, which had targeted only Jewish men.6 Dr. Gschliesser’s decree called on all the labor offices in the Kreis (county) administration to employ Jewish women, children, and the elderly as well. Jewish labor had to be utilized and was to be regarded by Jews as a means to safeguard their families. Three weeks earlier the Labor Office of the Generalgouvernement had ordered that Jewish agencies be responsible for maintaining labor camps.7 According to the decree, state-supplied housing and food in the camps were to be limited, as the local Jewish Councils were to provide most of the housing and food for the workers and their families. Upon the arrival of 2,000 Krakowian Jews for labor deployment in Chełm, the local county head reported to Kraków that it would be impossible to provide them even with the most primitive housing.8 Camp inmates forced to work in a peat mine of the Staw water-drainage camps in Chełm county testified: The Staw camp was just like hell. Slow dying: unsanitary con- ditions, hunger and illnesses. Here, I was together with my two brothers, one of whom was nine years old. We had to work in the 4 Ernst Gschliesser, Abteilung Arbeit an Leiter der Abteilungen Arbeit, July 26, 1940, Yad Vashem Archives (YVA), O.21/14. 5 Hans Frank wanted his capital, Kraków, to be the most Judenrein site in the Gen- eralgouvernement by November 1, 1940. However, until November 1940, about 60,000 Jews still remained in Krakow. Andrea Löw and Markus Roth, Juden in Krakau unter deutscher Besatzung, 1939–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011), p. 33. 6 Klaus-Peter Friedrich, ed., Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945, Band 4, Polen: September 1939 — Juli 1941 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), Document 115, pp. 287–288. On the punitive character of the October and December 1939 decrees ordering Jew- ish labor, see Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie En- dowment for International Peace, 1944), pp. 75–76. 7 Abteilung Arbeit, July 5, 1940, on the labor employment of the Jewish population, in Karol Marian Pospieszalski, Hitlerowskie prawo okupacyjne w Polsce, vol. II (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 1958), pp. 570–571. 8 Der Kreishauptmann des Kreises Cholm an die Regierung des GG, December 7, 1940, YVA, 1.2.7.7 (document 82177266) /ITS Digital Archives. © Yad Vashem Rural Hubs of Early Destruction • 41 open air, walking long distances, return by foot and singing songs. No matter whether it was raining or snowing, we had to work without clothes and shoes, and they located us in an old mill. And we didn’t have even one piece of soap to wash ourselves.9 This study integrates multiple stages of the ghettoization policy in the Generalgouvernment in terms of space10 and addresses the conse- quences of Gschliesser’s decree on the daily life of Jewish families ex- pelled from urban Jewish residential areas and rounded-up in remote labor camps. It compares the official reading of the July 26 decree with the experience of the victims and the perception of the witnesses and raises the following questions: From where in the German occupation apparatus did the utilization of the Jewish labor force arise? To where were workers relocated? Where did they work? What impact did their deployment have on the inmates’ life expectancy either in the camps or after their return home? Finally, when could Jewish agencies safeguard camp inmates’ elementary needs, and when could they not? Christopher Browning was the first historian to have intensively researched the early phase of Jewish forced labor in Poland. However, he focuses on industrial slave labor, and his results are not applicable for all forms of labor camps in the Generalgouvernement. Likewise, based mainly on German documentation, Wolf Gruner discusses forced utilization of Jews outside the concentration camps systemati- cally and comparatively for various German-occupied territories. He suggests necessary distinctions between organizational forms of Jew- ish forced labor in Poland, including the structure examined in this article.11 Though Tatiana Berenstein mentioned the Chełm waterworks camps in her comprehensive 1959 study about forced-labor camps 9 Testimony by Hela Weiss Fellenbaum from Lublin, Ghetto Fighters’ House (GFH), Archives, collections, 2377. 10 This research was greatly inspired by recent scholarship on various spaces of per- secution of Jews: Frank Golczewski, “A Jewish Space in an Extreme Context? Ger- man Ghettoes for Jews in Eastern Europe during World War II,” in Alina Gro- mova, Felix Heinert, and Sebastian Voigt, eds., Jewish and Non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context (Berlin: Neofelis, 2015), pp. 105–107; Tim Cole, Holocaust Land- scapes (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, eds., Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 11 Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 274. © Yad Vashem 42 • Frank Grelka in the Lublin District,12 the current state of research regarding non- industrial Jewish forced labor in the Generalgouvernement is patchy.13 As Stephan Lehnstaedt has shown, the German Labor Admin- istration in the Generalgouvernement of Poland established a system of registration, placement, and remuneration of the Jews. The labor offi ces favored “voluntary” employment, which specifically took ad- vantage of the desperate situation in which the persecuted Jews found themselves. For this reason the majority of the laboring Jewish popula- tion worked voluntarily and for little remuneration (in cash or food- stuffs) from 1940 to mid-1942.14 This study sheds light on the remaining 15–20 percent of forced- laborers from the perspectives of Jewish survivor testimony, Polish witness accounts, German government records, and perpetrators’ per- sonal narration. In addition it provides evidence that Jewish labor po- tential in an agricultural context on the Bug River was not a productive part of the Reich’s war economy, but rather an early setting for Hans Frank’s ghettoization agenda aiming at the Jewish urban population in his sphere of influence. Instead of Madagascar: Governor General Frank’s Provisional Concept of Jewish Labor Frequently historians analyze the economic function of forced labor by Jews chronologically.15 Few have emphazised the profound mean- ing of spatial practices for the Holocaust, despite the fact that German 12 Tatiana Berenstein, “Obozy pracy przymusowej dla Żydów w dystrykcie lubels- kim,” Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, vol. 24 (1957), pp. 3–20. 13 Robert Kuwałek, “Getta tranzytowe w dystrykcie lubelskim,” in Dariusz Libionka, ed., Akcja Reinhardt. Zagłada Żydów w Generalnym Gubernatorstwie (Warsaw: In- stytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2004), p. 140, footnote 3. 14 Stephan Lehnstaedt, “Die deutsche Arbeitsverwaltung im Generalgouvernement und die Juden,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 60, no. 3 (2012), p. 439. 15 Bogdan Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung und Judenverfolgung im Generalgou- vernement: Eine Fallstudie zum Distrikt Lublin 1939–1944 (Wiesbaden: Harras- sowitz, 1999), pp.
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