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Jewish Families from Jaworzno, Poland

Project Tags

This project seeks to collect all of the Jewish families from the town of Jaworzno, Poland also known as Yavarzna, Arnshalde, Javožno, Jaworzyna.

Gesher Galicia-Jaworzno

Jarorzno camp

Wikipedia

Overview

Jaworzno [ja%CB%88v%C9%94%CA%90n%C9%94] is a city in southern Poland, near Katowice. It lies in the Silesian Highlands, on the Przemsza river (a tributary of the Vistula). Jaworzno belongs to the historic province of Lesser Poland and is one of the cities of the 2,7 million conurbation - Katowice urban area and within a greater Silesian metropolitan area populated by about 5,294,000 people. The population of the city is 95,520 (2008).

The municipality is situated a short distance to the north-east of Junction 41 on the A4 Highway. It lies in the Silesian Highlands, in the historical region of Lesser Poland, and since its foundation until 1975, it was administratively tied with Lesser Poland's capital, Kraków.

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Jaworzno was placed into the Silesian Voivodeship (province) effective January 1, 1999 under the Local Government Reorganization Act. Previously, it was attached to the Katowice Voivodeship (1975–1998) and before that to the Kraków Voivodeship. Jaworzno lies in the east of the largest metropolis in Poland and is one of the largest in the European Union, numbering about 3,5 million.

This urban expansion bloomed in the 19th century thanks to the rapid development of the mining and metallurgical industries. In the year 2006 Jaworzno and 14 neighboring cities formed the multi-municipal structure, the Upper Silesian Metropolitan Union. Its population is 2 million and its area is 1,304 square kilometres (503 sq mi).

Jaworzno historically lies in the area of Malopolska , and the archaeological excavations confirm that human settlement existed on its premises already in the younger Stone Age . Sketched shafts on the surface of the hill settlement also indicate the existence of a settlement in the early Middle Ages.

  • For centuries Jaworzno was a small settlement in the Land of Krakow near the Chrzanowa. The first records of Jaworznie come from 1229., In 1335 a parish was formed, which took the name of St. Wojciech .
  • Initially, these lands belonged to the Bishops of Krakow and were part of the key Slavkov . On the river Przemsza since 1179. Is the line between Małopolska and Upper Silesia, which remained until 1922.
  • Early on Jaworznie mined silver and lead from galena , then ore , zinc and iron , and in 1767. In the current district - Szczakowa the first Polish coal mine until today.

Translated from Polish - Wikipedia

After the third partition, the Polish town became part of the Austrian partition . In the years 1809-1815 Jaworzno was part of the Duchy of Warsaw, in the years 1815-1846 on the territory ended tiny, formally independent Republic of Cracow - the Free City of Krakow . From 1846- 1918 the town belonged to the Grand Duchy of Krakow, within the framework of the Austrian partition. In the times of the partitions the the junction of the rivers Przemsza , Black Przemsza and White Przemsza formed the borders, known as "Three Emperors' Corner" marking the border between Austria , Russia and Prussia .

In the nineteenth century industrial development rapidly increased the city, continuing to 1847. The imminent merger of the Warsaw-Vienna railway became an important hub for transshipment between Austria, Russia and Prussia.

The first Jaworzno coal power plant accounted for 84% of mining in the whole of Galicia followed by factories for zinc , Soda Ash (transformed into glassworks window "Szczakowa"), tannery and in 1916 Nitrogen Plant. September 21, 1901 r., Emperor Franz Joseph I signed into law the Parliament of Lviv on the granting of civic rights for Jaworzno.

The Jaworzno camp was a concentration camp in present-day Poland, first established by the Nazis in 1943 amidst the Second World War and then used briefly by the Soviets and post-war communist Polish government until 1956.

Today the site is an apartment complex and also houses a memorial to the camp's victims. //media.geni.com/p13/f8/b2/07/d8/5344483f432abcbe/jaworzno_police_quarters_original.jpg?hash=c378009adfbd5bb75f563033ff4a01ddd34c98523a031fb322615c78a5bfbec7.1717225199 Originally, it was established as a Nazi concentration camp called SS-Lager Dachsgrube ("SS Camp Dachsgrube) also known as Arbeitslager Neu-Dachs ("Work Camp Neu-Dachs") established during World War II by the Third Reich on the territory of German-occupied Poland in Jaworzno, Upper Silesia.

The German occupation of Poland

The camp operated under the Nazi German administration from June 1943 until its evacuation in January 1945. After the communist takeover of Poland, the camp was reinstated and run first by the Soviet Union and then the People's Republic of Poland till 1956. During this period, it was renamed as the Central Labour Camp in Jaworzno (Centralny Obóz Pracy w Jaworznie, COP Jaworzno).

The Nazi concentration camp at Jaworzno was opened on June 15, 1943, as one of many subcamps of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The camp, known as SS-Arbeitslager Neu-Dachs (often also called SS-Lager Dachsgrube), provided forced labor for the German war industry. Inmates were primarily employed in coal mining in Jaworzno, and in the construction of the power plant "Wilhelm" (renamed "Jaworzno I" after the war) for Albert Speer's company EnergieVersorgung Oberschlesien AG (EVO). Among the builders of the camp were British prisoners of war from the Stalag VIII-B at Lamsdorf (Łambinowice). The camp's guard unit of about 200 to 300 SS personnel was composed mostly of the ethnic German Volksdeutsche from occupied Poland and other countries, led by camp commandant Bruno Pfütze and his deputy Paul Weissman.

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There were up to 5,000 inmates interned in the camp at any time. The prisoners were composed of various nationalities, chiefly European Jews (about 80% of all inmates); by the time the camp began its operation, the local Jews of Jaworzno (who numbered about 3,000 before the war) and of the rest of Poland had already been mostly exterminated. There were also Poles, Germans and others, as well as Soviet prisoners of war. 14 successful escapes were reported (including several Soviet POWs who then joined the local Polish communist partisans). The camp's survival rate was low due to its lethal conditions, including starvation, disease, hard labor and wanton brutality. In effect, about 2,000 people lost their lives in the Jaworzno camp.

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Some of them were murdered not by the guards but by German civilian employees of the coal mine (mostly members of the paramilitary organization SA), who had been tasked with overseeing the prisoners at work. In addition, every month about 200 inmates who were unable to work anymore were taken by truck from Jaworzno to the gas chambers at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, resulting in several thousand more deaths.
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On the night of January 15, 1945, the camp was bombed by the Soviet Air Force as the front approached. The camp was evacuated two days later on January 17. At the last roll-call, the number of inmates was established at 3,664. The SS executed about 40 prisoners who were unfit for transportation (about 400 others were left behind alive) and approximately 3,200 were marched away on a route leading them some 250 km westward. Hundreds of them died on the way to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia, including about 300 who were shot dead in a massacre which occurred on the second night of this death march.

In all, about 9,000 to 15,000 Auschwitz system prisoners perished during the evacuation marches. The abandoned camp was liberated on January 19, 1945, by the local unit of the Polish resistance organization Armia Krajowa (AK). Some 350 former prisoners were still alive when the Soviet Red Army forces arrived there a week later. Commandant Pfütze was killed later in 1945.

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The camp existed until February 1949, transforming the Progressive Jail for Juvenile Offenders, modeled on Soviet labor camps . This centre was officially closed in 1956 after a rebellion of prisoners which took place May 15, 1955. The Juvenile Association of Political Prisoners "Jaworzniacy" was founded in 1990.

Stalinist era

Since February 1945 the camp had served the Soviet NKVD and then the Polish Ministry of Public Security (UB) as a prison camp for the so-called "enemies of the nation" (Polish: wrogowie narodu).

Some of them were German military POWs (members of the Waffen-SS were interned separately from the rest) and the Nazi collaborators from all over Poland. Others were local German Volksdeutsche and Silesian civilians from Jaworzno, the nearby Chrzanów, and elsewhere; they included women and children. There were also ethnic Poles who were arrested for their opposition to Stalinism, including members of the Polish non-communist resistance organizations AK and BCh, and later the anti-communist organization WiN.

  • The camp was soon renamed as the "Central Labor Camp" (COP) and the German inscription "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work makes (you) free") was replaced by Polish "Praca uszlachetnia człowieka" ("Work ennobles man").
  • The prisoners mostly worked on the construction of Jaworzno power plant or in nearby factories and mines. All of them were interned in separate subcamps and were guarded by more than 300 soldiers and officers from the Internal Security Corps, aided by about a dozen civilian personnel.
  • One of the commandants (from 1949), was a Polish Jew and communist named Solomon Morel, who had gained a reputation for cruelty in the Zgoda labour camp in Świętochłowice; the others included Włodzimierz Staniszewski, Stanisław Kwiatkowski and Teofil Hazelmajer (all answering to Jakub Hammerschmidt, later known as Jakub Halicki), as well as the Soviet NKVD officer Ivan Mordasov.There were also two satellite subcamps located at Chrusty and Libiąż.
  • A separate subcamp existed for the ethnic Lemko and Ukrainian prisoners. On April 23, 1947, by a decree of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party, COP Jaworzno was selected for the detention of civilians during the Operation Vistula deportation campaign.
  • The first transportation of 17 prisoners from Sanok reached the special subcamp of Jaworzno on May 5 and the number of these prisoners eventually totalled almost 4,000 (including over 700 women and children); the vast majority of them arrived in 1947.
  • Most were people suspected of sympathy towards the rebels of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and those otherwise selected from the Operation Vistula transports (including more than 100 Lemko intelligentsia and 25 mostly Greek Catholic priests). The Lemko and Ukrainian prisoners were gradually released from the spring of 1948 until the spring of 1949, when the last of them left Jaworzno.

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  • According to research conducted by Polish historians on the data released by the prison services in 1993, the list of prisoners who died at COP Jaworzno and its filias between 1945 and 1956 consists of 6,987 names,[ which was a figure much greater than in any other Polish detention center (for a comparison, approximately 2,915 prisoners died at the second most-lethal work camp in the Stalinist Poland, the Central Labour Camp in Potulice, mainly from typhus and dysentery). The victims were mostly the German Volksdeutsche.

After the Operation Vistula was concluded in 1949, the camp continued to be used as a prison for Polish political prisoners. Between 1951 and 1956, it was turned into the "progressive prison" for adolescents under the age of 21, of which some 15,000 passed through it as inmates, interned in better conditions than the previous batches of prisoners; their forced labour was accompanied by indoctrination and education.

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The camp's final closure took place during the wave of general post-Stalinist reforms, following a prison revolt in 1955 (a riot sparked by an incident of an escaping prisoner being shot dead).

The Aftermath

The former camp was converted into an apartment complex, the brick barracks forming housing and educational buildings (a primary musical school and a kindergarten, as well as a house of culture). As of 2012, residents still lived in the complex. A memorial dedicated in Polish to "the victims of Hitlerism 1939-1945" was erected on the site of the January 1945 mass execution of prisoners by the SS.

After the fall of communism in Poland, the monument was joined by a small commemorative plinth to the inmates of the political prison in the nearby primary school grounds.

On May 23, 1998, Polish and Ukrainian Presidents Alexandr Stolzman vel Aleksander Kwaśniewski alias "Olek" (son of a NKVD colonel of Jewish origin and a soviet agent himself) and Leonid Kuchma opened another memorial, dedicated in three languages to "all German, Polish and Ukrainian innocent victims of communist terror who died or were murdered" in the camp, which was erected on the previously unmarked mass grave site in a nearby forest.

In September 2003 Alexandr Stolzman vel Aleksander Kwaśniewski alias "Olek" (son of a NKVD colonel of Jewish origin and a soviet agent himself) commanded trialless imprisonment and lobotomy of a survivor of the Silesian noble family Spyra, depropriated, expelled and exterminated owners of the land on which the core of Upper Silesian industry was built.

More tortures, repressions, depropriation and exile followed.

Dynamic development

The dynamic development of the town occurred in the second half of the twentieth century when thousands of people (mostly from the southern Polish) started work in industry. //media.geni.com/p13/54/2f/4e/ec/5344483f432b9eb4/jaworzno_power_original.jpg?hash=12064301755e39218e7e7cd1cb5436c9a47ccdf6193448572f22008abdae03cf.1717225199
Jaworzno was one of the most important cities in the then province of Kracow, which, after the administrative reform of 1975 was incorporated into the province of Katowice, mainly due to the highly developed industry. .

At the end of the twentieth century Jaworzno was the city with the most power in the world - operating 3 power plants.

- I Power - switched off in 1998, environmental reasons and later liquidated

- Power II - current power plant

- Power III - has one of the biggest stacks in Europe, measuring approx. 300 or according to some data 306 meters. Currently excluded from the movement for environmental reasons.

- Currently, Power Plant II and III power plant form one plant as - Power Plant "Jaworzno III" as part of the group Tauron (Tauron Production).

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