The university of criminals. The Janowska Camp in Lviv 1941-1944 - ebook

INTRODUCTION

Issuing the following publication about the Janowska camp in Lviv, we note that several fragments of testimony relating to the camp were already printed in “Documents of Crimes and Martyrdom”. Our forthcoming publications will include the diary of a twelve year old prisoner of Janowska (handed over to the Commission by the Krakow unit of R.P.Ż.)¹ as well as the draft currently under preparation: Literature in the Camp, by M.M. Borwicz. Some of the details regarding the Janowska camp, particularly with respect to its function in connection with the martyrdom of the Jews of Lviv, were provided by, among others, Dr. Filip Friedman, in his treatise, “The Destruction of the Jews of Lviv, 1941–1944, published by the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Łódź, which also plans to publish the memoirs of a former prisoner of the “Sands”.

The text of the “University of Criminals” contains a preface by a former activist associated with the conspiratorial activities of R.P.Ż., Maria Hochsberg-Mariańska.

The photographs scattered through the text were made mainly by the former SS-men associated with the camp, and were found after their departure. An article in the journal “New Horizons” was devoted to the predilections in thematic content, the characteristics and representations that manifest themselves in these photographic items forgotten by the Germans. In the aforementioned article, some of the pictures contained in this volume were reproduced.

The cover design and three of the drawings included in the text were made by Abba Fenichel. The terrifying representation of Gebauer was drawn by Karol Ferster. The emblem of the publishing house and two of the chapter headings in the original 1946 edition were designed by Josef Bau.

(Editorial Committee, 1946)

1 R.P.Ż. is the acronym for Rada Pomocy Żydom (The Council of Aid for the Jews) established under the auspices of the Polish Government in Exile (in the United Kingdom) and the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), whose primary purpose was to aid Jews and find places of safety for them in occupied Poland. It was also known by the more popular appellation Żegota and was established in Warsaw in September 1942, in the aftermath of the “Great Deportation”. Żegota progressively established conspiratorial cells in a number of major cities in Poland, including Kraków. For a detailed analysis of its activities see I. Tomaszewski, T. Werbowski, Żegota: The Rescue of Jews in Wartime Poland (Montreal: Price-Patterson, 1994).1946 INTRODUCTION BY MARIA HOCHBERG-MARIAŃSKA

I

In the unending register of Hitler’s murderous crimes the news about everything that did occur has not spread equally quickly or equally widely. About the most brutal places of incarceration relatively little has been known. This was not an accident: with regard to such places of torture the occupying forces were especially concerned to maintain secrecy. The number of prisoners who escaped from such places – Janowska, Bełżec, Sobibor, and the spider’s web of labour camps along the Lviv–Tarnopol road – was small. The majority of prisoners, once they had crossed over the border of a death camp, never again returned to the free world.

To such places of massive crimes, about which relatively little was known except to those in the immediate vicinity (and even then, only a few), belongs the camp in Lviv known as Janowska (from the street on which it was located). The camp exceeded others in criminal methodology and in the range of torments, being (even for Hitler’s criminals) something of a kind of “university of criminality”, a higher college of sadism. The “professors” of this macabre school were recruited from those who had previously distinguished themselves in the trade of torturer. Włodomierz Belajew, in a work entitled “It Happened in Lviv”, informs us that all of them were trained in the notorious Jagdkommando (a special operations brigade) of Dr. Dirlewanger. A well known activist in the SS movement, “doctor” Dirlewanger (an ignoramous, who on the orders of the gestapo received an honorary doctorate from one of the universities in Germany), trained sixty select executioners over a long period of time in his Jagdkommando. Before their dispatch into the concentration camp universe, all of them were, in time, presented to Hitler. Ten of them arrived at Janowska.

Under the seasoned direction of such “lecturers” other degenerates received their education in the Janowska camp. Many of the murderers, subsequently written into the most bloody episodes of other camps and prisons, spent a formative period at Janowska, or alternatively, arrived there to undertake “training courses”.

The Germans entered Lviv on 30 June / 1 July 1941. Whereas in the territories occupied in 1939 the torment had already lasted two years and German criminality was poised to enter a new phase, in Lviv, under Soviet occupation from the autumn of 1939, from the first moment the murders assumed a mass character and continued without a break. The victims did not have time to take a breath, did not have time to orientate themselves, and even less, establish conspiratorial contacts after the initial onslaught.

The ferocity of the occupiers assumed proportions of scale that were simply extraordinary. Because it was not possible to murder their victims twice, the suffering was extended, and refined, and death made a terrible torture. Janowska, as a place of torture, had such an objective, and those torturers incumbent in the camp fulfilled it one hundred percent. The examination conducted by the Special Committee of Investigation (the Z.S.R.R.) established that as many as 200 000 individuals were murdered in the environs of the Janowska camp, and in the Lesienicki forest.

The residents of Lviv knew the incredible reality of the Janowska camp from the prisoners seen travelling (on foot) to work in town. Independently of that, within the somber atmosphere of the camp there took place – as it turned out – efforts to transmit the brutal truth into the future, in the form of journalistic reportage and literary work.

There was yet a further phase in the fate of those works. Efforts were aimed at preserving them, in order that they would outlast the barbarous time of the occupation despite the expected and almost unavoidable death of their authors. They could then be revealed, let loose into our volatile reality. Manuscripts, via elaborate methods, passed beyond the barbed wire, into places and into the hands of random individuals. There is nothing surprising in the fact that the majority of them were not preserved. After multiple failures, the small cell of secret camp conspirators managed to acquire a most important contact. According to received instructions, the particulars of this underground organizational address were known only to the organizer of the clandestine cells, Borwicz – his few closest co-workers knew it but without current specifics. The address turned out to be “distant” Kraków – the headquarters of the R.P.Ż.

Our contacts began accidentally from a search we conducted to identify the author of the following tome². Few details were known to us: up until his incarceration in Janowska he had resided in Lviv, where, early in the German occupation he had made contact several times with the people’s organization. It was also in Lviv, during the early stages of the German occupation, that he met with the secretary of the Kraków branch of O.K.R., a Polish Socialist Party activist operating under the pseudonym “Teodor”³, with whom he discussed the establishment of conspiratorial activity. After that all traces of him ended.

It was in the summer of 1943 that Teodor began to urge a further search for Borwicz (Boruchowicz). At that time successful contact with the Janowska camp had been established through the German furniture factory in Lviv, “Niesel u. Kammer”, where prisoners from the camp were brought to work on a daily basis. One of those registered at the factory, in a pseudonymous capacity, Mieczysław Piotrowski (M. Kurz) – who as a legitimate employee of the factory facilitated travel and contacts along the Kraków–Lviv railway line – brought the first new news about Borwicz, or more correctly, one might say, specifically, about his death. One of the workers within the environs of the camp believed he had himself seen the corpse of Borwicz. However Teodor, the rationalist, this time trusted his intuition. He urged those workers passing through “Niesel u. Kammer” to make a clearer identification. And then, not only news, but a handwritten note was brought from Borwicz. It turned out the sender was not only alive in the Janowska camp but also – as Borwicz himself made clear in his own tiny handwriting – “as a matter of fact his occupation had not changed”.

We ourselves found this last fact very difficult to accept. To those associated with the work of the R.P.Ż. the conditions of life in the camp were already well known. It did not seem probable that underground activity, and a cell of co-conspirators, could establish something concrete in such conditions. And yet, in spite of our instinctive reservations, something did exist. In the tiny little notes that began to arrive with urgent regularity, and via carefully established contacts with members of the R.P.Ż., a fuller picture began to emerge: a secret army, with coded units; secret literary events, organized in temporarily abandoned or deserted barracks of songs and poems composed after work or while clearing the streets of snow and ice, verses engraved into memory and recited on camp bunks; and in the end about matters outside the literary sphere, about maintaining one’s humanity, short and to the point: about defense. It was at this juncture that friends of the conspirators in the Janowska camp, seasoned activists who had more than once been capable of acts of bravery themselves, raised their eyebrows. They said, “you’re madmen!”. One might say it was difficult to receive a higher compliment in those times.

Contact with the Janowska camp, once established, began to crystallize. From the camp to the headquarters of the R.P.Ż. in Kraków, letters, verses, notes and reports wound their way. And from Kraków Kennkarte⁴ and other legal documents were sent back into the camp. Photographs attached to the documents we received had been made in the photographic laboratory of the camp, whose director was the blood-soaked sadist Obersturmfuhrer Gebauer.

From the news received from the Janowska camp it emerged that the group organized by Borwicz had already painstakingly developed an array of contacts with those living outside the camp, and that plans for resistance and escape were constantly under discussion. The organization of such ventures had however to be worked out in great detail. Escape attempts usually ended in failure. The unsuccessful escapee ended his life under the most elaborate torture. When an escape attempt succeeded it resulted in the deaths of five or ten of the prisoners from the “brigade”⁵ of the escapee. There were cases where whole brigades had been murdered after the successful escape of one individual.

Borwicz drew up the plans and also made possible the contacts while he remained in his position at the head of the camp conspiracy. But from his experiences in the camp and his knowledge of the reality outside it became increasingly evident that it was only possible to save people individually.

By the autumn of 1943, for the survivors still in the camp few illusions remained with regard to their ultimate fate. In Kraków “Teodor” and the chairman of the R.P.Ż. Stanisław Dobrowolski, those closest to Borwicz, recognized that it was inadvisable to extend his captivity and made the decision to organise his escape. The secretary of the R.P.Ż., Wł. Wójcik, managed the technical detail, organising the necessary papers and dispatching liaison officers. With the collaboration of the conspirators inside the camp the prisoner was freed. He travelled to Kraków in the company of our liaison officers, as railway assistant (Bahnassistent) Michal Borucki. The daring escape, devised in detail inside the camp, did not this time provoke the usual consequences. The next secret message from the camp said that no tears had been shed for “Illian” (Borwicz’s camp pseudonym).

Contact with the Janowska camp continued. Successful attempts were made by us, relying on the contacts established by Borwicz and in accordance with his instructions, to save several other people. Money was sent to Lviv for the escapees for whom hiding places had been found, then we sent documents and tried to ease their first steps into the unfriendly world; with others it was necessary to accommodate them in Kraków itself or the surrounding countryside. By means of well-prepared cooperation, at the appropriate moment one corpse would be counted as two (and corps were abundant), the first time the correct number was reported and on the second counting the number of the escapee would be added. In the estimation of the prisoners such complicated mathematical adjustments were accepted by those at the control booth as tallying with the account. We were already in the time just prior to the final liquidation of the camp. Our ongoing efforts, the aim of which was to save further prisoners, were overtaken by death. Individuals of extraordinary ability, intellectual capacity and artistry perished in the Janowska camp. Many of them, in the final moments, did not have the willpower or willingness to escape. The long slow months of torture and fatigue had done their work. When they needed to contain their nerves their internal strength had abandoned them. This was one of the most brutal obstructions to our work. I write “our work” because – relying on our own recollections – it is only that tiny sample, that miniscule proportion, about which I have the authority to write about here⁶.

II

Photographic and literary material referring to the Janowska camp that reached the Kraków post of the R.P.Ż. was preserved except for a few manuscripts in Yiddish which had been stored by a liaison officer in the country and got burned in a bombed house. The vicissitudes and the lot of those papers, as well as the living “charges”, will be described at some other place.

While Borwicz was still in the camp, and as manuscripts continued to arrive, we attempted to make systematic use of selected fragments in the underground press. The poems and verses – warmed by the blood of the martyrs – found their own winding road from liaison post to liaison post. Several of the aforementioned verses and poems made their appearance in a collection under the title “From the Abyss”, published secretly by the underground Jewish National Committee in Warsaw in 1944 and comprising poems by Jewish and Polish poets with the central theme being Jewish martyrdom.

The work on consolidating and re-drafting the factual material Borwicz had dispatched from the camp continued even when a new stage began in his conspiratorial life, when he assumed command of a unit of partisans and fighters of the PPS in the region of Miechów. He had again changed his line of work although he did not discard his occupation as a resistance fighter. Alongside his army work and organizational activity, unrelated to the theme of the following book, he continued his own literary activity. This time the soldier’s songs and verses could be written for real, on clear paper, with a permanent pen. They could also be published in the underground press. Meetings and briefings took place in barns and village schools, where the acoustics were better than in the Janowska camp, and where the participants in each conspiratorial lecture answered by echoing the password “Freedom”, which was taken up by the gathered fighters and deployed to the circle of lookouts. Together with articles for the undergound press, poems and soldier’s songs, the post (which ran regularly between Kraków and Miechowski), also brought rough drafts of camp reportage, among them the aforementioned “Literature in the Camp”, as well as the sketches here gathered by the author into a book.

This material found its place in the box of coal with the false bottom, where alongside those necessary “legal” stage props of the PPS, part of the archive of the Kraków branch of the R.P.Ż. was placed. That false-bottomed drawer and other suchlike drawers scattered in different places and in different Polish towns became major sources of future historical work. In the false-bottomed drawer alongside materials and recollections of the R.P.Ż. there were several books from the “black list”, among them the novel by Borwicz published in 1938 and entitled “Love and Race”. After each new store of literary and factual material found its way from different concentration camps to that false-bottomed box, fragments of the novel, devoted to experiences in a pre-war German concentration camp, seemed to pale to me more and more. The author of “Love and Race” could not have imagined that in such a short time he would be given “excellent” opportunity to gather new source materials. In Janowska camp he must have smiled pitifully more than once at the recollection of the idyllic camp experiences of his own literary hero.

This juxtaposition of pertinent fragments of the pre-war novel with the documentary descriptions contained in “The University of Criminals” is one of the most terrifying examples of the fact that the imagination is unable to concoct anything that approximates the vast expanse and baseness of Nazi crimes.

2 According to his own testimony, given to Raphael Lemkin on 12 September 1945, Borwicz was captured between the night of the 5^(th) and 6^(th) of January 1943, while attempting to smuggle back into the ghetto two guns concealed in his pockets. Although he had received help from a Jewish policeman, on entering the ghetto he found himself near a crowd of Jews already slated for deportation. The group was already surrounded by the gestapo. He joined the crowd, and under the cover of night, disposed of the two guns. He was then taken together with the aforementioned group of Jews to the Kleparów station, where a selection occurred. At the station, the younger and stronger men were selected for incarceration in Janowska, while those selected for deportation were required to disrobe before entering the trains. It was in this way he entered the camp (testimony of M.M. Borwicz to R. Lemkin, 12.1945; Yad Vashem Archive, file YVA 018/242).

3 The pseudonym of Adam Rysiewicz, of the most active participants in the Polish conspiracy in the vicinity of Kraków. He fell at his post on 27 June 1944, with a gun in his hand, in battle, together with two other armed combantants of the PPS (Polish Socialist Party) at the station in Ryczów. After his death his name was given to a socialist combat unit (The Combat Unit of the PPS in the name of our comrade Teodor). .

4 Aryan work permits, allowing Jews to assume a false Aryan identity with legitimate work papers.

5 Brigade – in other camps known as a “work squad”, a group or unit of prisoners. .

6 Actually, the camp under the management of Willhaus–Warzog continued for some time in vestigial form. After the Jewish prisoners had been murdered, some Poles, Ukrainians and Volksdeutsche still remained there. The camp was then shortly „revived” with survivors, mainly Jews, caught on the „Aryan” side. A mass murder factory was turned into a minor one. Prolonging the existence of the Janowska camp was probably caused by the fact that the SS members feared losing “a job”, as it meant that they would be sent to the front.THE STATION AT KLEPARÓW

The Janowska camp was (…) something of a type of training course for commandants and guards who were afterwards distributed to other camps. Here, under the expert direction of those who specialized in the search for methods of murder that prolonged the suffering of the condemned, they studied. Here, with the use of a blunt stick they penetrated people’s stomachs, or froze them in buckets of water; here they demonstrated the art of shooting children tossed upwards into the air, or cleaved them in two with an axe, like one might split a thin stick of firewood. The camp on Janowska street was a university of bestiality, while Majdanek, Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald were secondary schools of the same bestiality, with the primary school being a German upbringing, Hitler’s training (…).

“New Horizons”:The German Soul

In order to reach the railway station of Kleparów, located on the outskirts of Lviv, it is necessary to travel to the end of Janowska street and there, exactly opposite the gates of the camp, turn left onto a side road. It was to this place that the open-topped tram lorries brought tens of thousands of men and women, old people and children. Here the victims were deprived of all decent clothes and shoes. Here in torn clothes or already naked, maltreated and beaten, they were loaded into wagons. Here the spectre-trains were sealed and wired; here an escort was assigned to each carriage; from here those wagons departed. An indeterminate number of those loaded in this place were to die during the journey from exhaustion or from wounds, from the unimaginable crush inside the wagons or the resulting airlessness. In spite of the seals and wires some people got out of the carriages and jumped from the running train. Then automatic weapons whirred and a storm of bullets followed the desperate escapees. Corpses marked the route of the train, along the railway embankment. In the middle of the frosty winter the inhabitants of the surrounding villages met naked people who eyes were unfocused by madness or glowed with stubborn determination. Most of those phantom castaways died from frost, hunger or a bullet. Some perished because they didn’t have anything left with which to offer a bribe, others, conversely, because they had managed to preserve some money or jewelry, that others coveted. Only some managed to obtain refuge, a rare few managed to reach a unit of partisans, after a long period of roaming and inhuman experiences. Still others, who were lucky to receive help and get some clothing, returned to Lviv anyway. Those returns were evoked by the nightmarish fatalism of someone driven by cold or hunger, or by a desperate longing for their child or their mother, or for the last of their closest ones, who the Germans had not yet managed to kill. There were those, who by the time they reached the gas chambers of Bełżec or Sobibor, or met their death in Lviv, in the so-called “Sands”, had been loaded into the death trains at the station in Kleparów already three times.

Not far from here, in front of the camp gates, on Janowska street itself, gunshots were also directed at the torturers, shots delivered by prisoners who themselves were being led to their deaths. But the hail of bullets that issued from the automatic weapons of the SS and askaris⁷ obliterated the almost symbolic outburst of the feeble and heroically helpless .6 and .7 calibre handguns. And only us, those few who remained alive, knew how much there was to overcome, and how many difficulties were surmounted to obtain those guns and organise a defence which was nothing more than just symbolic. But that was only in the last, final months.

It was this way too that the prisoners ran on the day of the camp’s final liquidation; with bare hands they grabbed the barbed wire fence and in the hail of bullets, over the corpses of their comrades struck down in the escape, they attempted to reach the Brzuchowicki forest, and from there make contact with the partisans.

The little station building of Kleparów seems oddly inconspicuous. On the faded, battered and dirty walls the remnants of pre-war notices remain. Among them the slogan: “Cook with gas!”. That notice had nothing whatsoever to do with the aforementioned trains; it was placed here in a moment when even the most degenerate imagination could not foresee the reality of the occupation.

Beyond the aforementioned, Kleparów also fulfilled one further rather anemic function as a commuter station, where the relatively rare and bored passengers waited for the relatively rare trains. The proximity of the camp bestowed upon those passengers a performance that comparative suburban stations would not provide.

For one should note that the death factories with which Hitlerism covered Europe were branches of a giant corporation with one council of supervisors. Individual branches sent the others the results of their experiences at the limits of sadism, or experts in the discipline, or experimental material sourced from the bodies of prisoners, and even technical apparatus. In comparison to other places of torture the camp in Lviv fulfilled its role as a university of bestiality: it trained qualified specialists. Independently of that it sent prisoners to its outposts, and conversely – it received the survivors from the liquidated branches. Furthermore, at Kleparów, trains arrived loaded with the walls of barracks dismantled elsewhere and with similar building materials. At such times the bitterly named activity of the “vitamins” took place.

7 A disdainful German epithet for this mercenary group mainly comprised of former Soviet prisoners of war. The appellation “askari” was widely used in the prisoner of war camps. In the concentration camps of Lviv the Askaris fulfilled a number of functions, among them, guarding the observation towers surrounding the camp. Hence the observation towers themselves were popularly referred to in a manner that suggested they were filled with “askaris.” .