Belgian coal recruitment

Origins and purpose

The recruitment served two aims that pulled against each other. For the Belgian mining industry it was a labour operation, and the men were wanted underground. For the International Refugee Organisation, which managed the camps and the selection, it was resettlement, and the Belgian authorities promised the refugees a free and normal life in Belgium. The historians of the scheme identify that tension as the source of the trouble that followed, both during recruitment and afterwards.1

The IRO's position was general rather than particular to Belgium. Selection teams sent by destination countries were recruiting labour to their own governments' economic requirements, and resettlement outside the United States and Israel was organised almost entirely according to those requirements.5

How it worked in practice

Recruitment took place inside the refugee camps in occupied Germany, which the IRO administered from July 1947. Candidates who accepted signed a two-year contract for work in the Belgian mines. Selection favoured men fit for underground work; the Belgian and IRO records of the operation are held in the Brussels state archives, the Hasselt state archive holdings of the coal employers' federation Fedechar, the UNHCR office in Brussels and the IRO series AJ 43 in the French national archives.21

Housing was the immediate constraint on arrival. The collieries put up new lodging houses for single men in the garden suburbs and built new estates with the national cheap housing company, and where that was not fast enough they used prefabricated temporary settlements. They also reused what the occupation had left: from 1947 the prisoner of war barracks camps built by the Germans housed the immigrants and their families, 225 huts of timber and asphalt paper, to be demolished as other accommodation became available. They lasted much longer than intended. In 1958 there were still 257 families and 971 single men living in converted barracks at Genk, Lanklaar and Houthalen.4

The Ukrainians who came under the scheme reached the Limburg pits and the Walloon coalfield alike, and the site pages for Waterschei, Zwartberg and the Russisch Kamp at Eisden record the reuse of those particular camps for contract workers from 1947. Belgian settlement concentrated in the coal region: the provinces of Hainaut, Limburg and Liege.42

A comparative study of the Liege and Limburg coalfields gives local figures for the Walloon side of the recruitment. A first post-war group of Polish displaced persons had arrived in Belgium in 1945; a second group came over from the refugee camps in Germany in the spring of 1947, and an estimated thousand of them were employed in the Liege mines. In total 3,917 displaced persons were employed in the Liege basin during 1947, most of them in the coal mines. Almost half of the displaced persons who arrived in Belgium in 1947 and 1948 held Polish nationality and the other half comprised twenty other, mainly East European, nationalities, which the study does not list separately. Between the end of 1944 and the end of 1952 the number of miners of non-Belgian nationality at Liege became six times larger, while the number of Belgians in the Liege mining industry fell by more than 3,000.6

The Ukrainian experience within the scheme

Ukrainians were already present in small numbers before the scheme. About 2,000 refugees, mostly women who had been forced labourers in Germany, had arrived from 1945, and the Ukrainian Relief Committee in Belgium was formed in Brussels that year. The recruitment changed the scale. By 1947 the number of Ukrainians in Belgium had risen to about 10,000 as refugees from the displaced persons camps in Germany accepted work under the two-year contracts. That is a Ukrainian figure for the country as a whole, not a count of Ukrainian miners, and it is not a subtotal of the 21,906 recorded for the mines.21

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic account of the Limburg parishes describes the same movement from the inside. Several thousand Ukrainians came to Belgium for shorter or longer periods between 1947 and 1949 for work offered in the coal mines under the kolenslag, and several thousand of those went to the Limburg pits. Redemptorist priests were the first to provide pastoral care, and small associations rather than formal parishes formed around the collieries at Waterschei, Winterslag and Zwartberg in about 1949 and 1950. From 1950 to 1963 a single priest served Genk and Zolder, given a miner's house and a subsidy by the director of the Andre Dumont mine and travelling between the communities at first by bicycle.3

Community organisation was rapid and wide. The Ukrainian Relief Committee ran 29 branches between 1946 and 1949; the Ukrainian Youth Association had 21 chapters by 1949; the Ukrainian Student Home was established at Leuven with the help of the Apostolic See and Archbishop Ivan Buchko, and a Ukrainian Learned Educational Society was formed in 1947. Under Buchko the pastoral work was organised as a deanery with centres at Brussels, Wasmes, La Louviere, Liege, Leuven and Genk. The Limburg miners maintained their own cultural house, where children were taught reading and writing, catechism, Ukrainian geography and history and church music.23

What happened afterwards

The resettlement half of the bargain did not hold. Dissatisfaction with conditions in Belgium was marked enough to be noted in the IRO's own practice: refugees who returned from Belgium to the western zones of Germany were treated by the organisation as not yet resettled and therefore still eligible for other schemes. The historians of the Belgian operation conclude that in the end the majority of the refugees decided it looked more promising to start a new life elsewhere.51

The Ukrainian numbers show the same movement. On completing their contracts some returned to Germany and some went on to the United States and Canada. The Ukrainian population of Belgium fell from about 10,000 in 1947 to about 5,000 in 1955 and about 4,000 by 1977. The parish account records the same drift: as people left for distant countries the number of Ukrainians declined steadily and the parish centres were reduced to three, at Waterschei-Genk, Zolder and Eisden.23

By comparison with the countries of mass overseas resettlement, Belgium's share was small. The IRO's final statistical report records 10,378 Poles resettled in Belgium out of 357,635 Polish nationals resettled in all, against 35,780 to Great Britain and 60,308 to Australia. The Belgian intake was heavily concentrated in one industry, and its Ukrainian component was largely a transit population.52