As the 8th
of May 2025 was approaching, an idea started forming in my head. I wanted to be
at the very place where my father, Josef Lewkowicz, had been liberated 80 years
earlier. It was the beginning of a new life for him after more than two years
incarcerated in six concentration camps, he had just turned 17.
Although we had
travelled to Poland together before and he had shown me where he grew up and
where he lived (and was hidden) in the ghetto of Chrzanow, and we had visited
Auschwitz, where his mother was murdered, he had not shown me the places where
he worked as a slave labourer, together with his father Moses and brother
Perec, from spring of 1943, when he was captured and sent to the Sosnowice
transit camp, until the 8th of May 1945.
When we talked
about his experiences during the war in daily conversations, these places
remained abstract, he mentioned that he worked for German industries and that
the camps he stayed in were smaller labour camps. The details and locations of
these camps remained vague for me.
So I was rather
surprised when I realised in preparation for the trip to find the remnants of
these camps, to find out that they all were in relative close vicinity to
Wroclaw, then the German city of Breslau. Reading and learning more about these
labour camps, I realised there was a reason for this. The camps were all part
of ‘Organisation Schmeldt’, which brought mostly Jewish prisoners to work as
slave labourers to the vicinity of German industries. My father was incarcerated
first in Markstadt, (today Jelcz-Laskowice), and was sent every day to work in
the huge Kraftborn electricity plant (today Siechnice). In his last camp,
called Reichenbach-Sportschule, he worked as a slave labourer at Siemens in the town of Reichenbach. That camp
was a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen and that was where he was liberated. I wanted to
be as close to the location of that camp as possible, to mark the 80th
anniversary of his liberation in 1945.
While I managed
to ascertain that the town of Reichenbach is now called Dzierzionow, I could
not find out much more online about the Reichenbach Sportschule camp. There was
only one site which mentioned the camp and had some information and some
photographs listed. It was a blog site by Janek
Pawul, who grew up on Dzierzionow and who became a well-known DJ in
Poland. I knew that it would be very difficult to find any traces of the camp
by myself, so I wrote an e-mail to the e-mail address given on Jan’s blog site,
saying that I was planning a visit and asking if it was possible to meet. I was
positively surprised when I had a reply from Jan a few hours later, saying that
he would be delighted to meet us and that he was happy to travel to
Dzierzioniow from Katowice, where he lives today. He did not know at that point
that my father came from Katowice and that that was the city he returned to
after being liberated. We arranged to meet in the centre of Dzierzionow in a
few weeks’ time.
On the 8th
of May in the morning, we set out from Wroclaw to the arranged meeting place in
Dzierzionow and met Jan, who was already waiting for us. I was grateful that he
was willing to share his knowledge and show us the location of the camp. We
followed his car and a few kilometres outside the town, we turned into a small
road which took us to an abandoned piece of land, secured by two fences. We
could see the old barracks and something which looked like a watch towner. I
did not expect this, I did not expect the barracks to be still there today. I
did not expect to find the fence which my father described in his interview for
the Shoah Foundation in 1996. It made his experiences of 80 years ago so very
tangible. It felt important to place his memories here and to read an excerpt
from his memories here, his voice mediated by my voice and translation.
He describes his
arrival as follows:
‘We were in the fortunate position that they still needed us for work,
we were still needed for the German final victory. Of 1,300 people, 500 were
sent to Auschwitz. The rest, which included myself, my brother, and father,
were sent to the Reichenbach-Sportschule concentration camp. The SS was already
waiting for us there.We had to strip naked and then they took us to a delousing
facility. After the delousing, they put us in barracks that had been built
there. They were not wooden barracks. Everyone was assigned to a different Block.
among ourselves. I was in the fifth Block,
my father was in the seventh Block, and I think my brother was in the ninth Block.
We had the same work as in the previous camp, because it was all in same vicinity.
My brother worked in the brickworks, and I continued to work at Siemens in
Reichenbach, doing construction work. My father continued to work in the camp
as a potato peeler’.
My father’s recollections make
me understand how these barracks have survived until today, as there were not
made from wood and the whole complex was used as a pig farm after the war.
During our visit we met a woman who grew up here and her parents had worked as
pig farmers on this site. She thought that at least one of the barracks could
be converted into a museum to tell the story of the camp. Although there is a
small memorial in the nearby forest for the people who died in the
Reichenbach-Sportschule camp, there is no sign or explanation on or near the
site.
In total, my father stayed for
about nine months at the Reichenbach - Sportschule camp. He told the story of
liberation in his interview but he also talked about it many other times. It is
a story of hope for a better life, which started when the SS commandant called
all the prisoners to come to the assembly point.
Here is the story in my father’s
words:
‘SScamp
commandant Ulrich called all the prisoners on the 7th of May, all 860,
to the assembly square and said to us: “We are leaving tomorrow and you will be
free men. We are leaving.” And he asked the Jewish elder to tear off his epaulettes,
as a symbolic gesture. The next day, the SS were gone. And we stayed in the
camp. The camp was outside the city and we did not know what to do. The Germans
had left but the Russians had not arrived. Everyone was afraid to go out. It
was decided that a boy should go out first and the choice fell on me. I was
lifted across the barbed wire and made it to the main road, where I saw a
Soviet army column coming my way. I looked them and they looked at me, I was
still the striped uniform from the camp. I found one officer who understood
some Yiddish and told him about our camp. He them diverted the whole column to
the location of the camp and that's how we were liberated. I can remember something
else. When we were liberated, the Soviet officer in charge, said to us:“Can you
bring me a table? We thought he was going to distribute food or something. He
climbed onto the table in the middle of the assembly square and said: “Can you
see the sun? We all looked up at the sun. The he continued: “Today the sun has
come to you.” And that was it.
My father describes that he,
his brother, and father shortly after the liberation went into the town of
Reichenbach and settled in an empty house, which had belonged to a German
family who fled Reichenbach, where they recuperated.
When I asked him in the
interview what liberation felt like, he replied:
‘It is hard to describe that feeling. Of course, it was a feeling of
happiness. You got out and you are free. You do not need to think about death
every minute of the day’.
Standing on the
edge of the barracks on a spring day in 2025, I feel very grateful that my
father, his brother and father survived the terrible conditions in the five
labour camps they were sent to and managed to stay alive until they were
liberated by the Soviet army here in this very place, 80 years ago, and were
able to start the journey of re-building their lives in May 1945, sadly without
Josef’s mother Regina who was murdered in Auschwitz.
Thank you to Janek
Pawul for having created a blog with photos and information on the little known
history of the Reichenbach-Sportschule camp and for taking the time to show us
around and share your knowledge.
Dr Bea Lewkowicz,
May 2025
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