The three Belgian pages are hut camps beside the coal mines of Limburg, all of them built in 1942. Zwartberg Camp was nineteen wooden huts on Lucien Londotstraat, put up in June; Eisden–Lanklaar Camp was about twenty huts beside the Zuid-Willemsvaart, serving the Eisden colliery; Waterschei Camp stood on Wildekerslaan beside the Waterschei mine.123
The people in them were Ostarbeiter, civilians deported from Ukraine and other eastern territories to work underground, alongside Soviet prisoners of war; Waterschei was the one camp in the district reserved for the civilian deportees. A second Ukrainian arrival came after the war, when the kolenslag of 1947 to 1951 recruited in the camps of occupied Germany on two-year mining contracts and brought 21,906 eastern European refugees into the Belgian mines, and the Ukrainian population of the country rose to about 10,000 by 1947.456
The huts outlasted the occupation. They held German prisoners, then became emergency dwellings for migrant families, 263 of them at Lanklaar, until that camp was closed in 1965, while a Ukrainian Greek Catholic parish grew in the same mining district. The colliery returns behind these pages count Ostarbeiter and prisoners camp by camp rather than by nationality, so the Ukrainians in them are identified by the mine's own usage, by a wartime return and by police statements taken later, not by a separate count.789
Belgium received 22,183 of the 690,145 people resettled in that period.
About twenty wooden huts were built beside the Zuid-Willemsvaart in 1942 to hold forced workers for the Eisden colliery, among them people the mine called Ukrainians. The same huts later held German prisoners and then became 263 emergency dwellings for migrant families, until the camp was closed in 1965.
A barracks camp built beside the Waterschei coal mine in 1942 became the one camp in the Limburg mining district reserved for Ostarbeiter, civilians deported from Ukraine and other eastern territories. Mining records, a wartime return and police statements taken in Genk in 1968 describe the work, the punishments and the deaths behind its wire.
Nineteen wooden huts were put up on Lucien Londotstraat in June 1942 to hold Soviet prisoners for the John Cockerill colliery, and Ukrainian and Russian civilians were among the first people sent there. The camp passed through detention, military occupation and migrant lodging before it was cleared at the end of 1956.