Cornberg

From mining settlement to displaced-persons camp

Cornberg was built between 1938 and 1941 for workers in the Kurhessische copper-shale industry. Planners chose local sandstone rather than the half-timbered construction common in neighbouring villages. Bright rows of houses followed the hillside. Wartime conditions curtailed the much larger settlement originally planned, leaving communal facilities unfinished.

Establishing the camp displaced the settlement’s earlier residents. They had to move to neighbouring villages. A local recollection describes leaving furniture in the houses and taking only personal possessions and household necessities; armed American soldiers searched departing carts at a checkpoint.

The municipality dates the requisition to 1 November 1945. The local account and a priest’s later report give 9 November. The precise relationship between these two dates remains unclear, but both place the transition in November 1945.

Homes and a changing population

The settlement’s existing houses became the setting for camp life. A winter photograph shows long rows of homes following the slope, with open ground between them. In a 1946 wedding photograph, neighbours watch the bridal party pass along a street beside the houses.

Ihor Stebelsky’s comparative table records 2,481 Ukrainians in August 1946, 1,999 in May 1947 and 2,098 in December 1947. His separate figure of 2,338 comes from questionnaire returns collected during 1946–1947. The municipal description of an initial refuge for about 4,000 eastern Europeans has a broader scope and no precise census date.

Learning practical skills

Cornberg had an elementary school, a secondary school and a trade school, alongside community organisations. These institutions served a population rebuilding its education and working life after displacement.

One instructor can be named. Wolodymyr Szafranowycz taught at the driving school at Camp 566 from November 1945 through December 1946. A certificate dated 21 January 1947, preserved in transcription by his family, identifies his work, welfare officer D. Davies and UNRRA Area Team 1023.

Teaching in the camp was not confined to trades. The same issue of Chuzhynoiu records that a music school began work in the camp on 12 March 1946, its task being to give a grounding in music and to teach the more able young people to play the violin, the accordion and the piano.

Churches, a pastor and a visiting choir

German priest Hasenau and Ukrainian priest Hryhorij Onufrij cooperated in establishing an emergency chapel. In Hasenau’s account, he provided financial help while Onufrij supplied workers. The chapel opened for Christmas 1945. A separate account describes Catholic Christians beginning the barracks church in 1945 and Ukrainians completing it in 1945–1946.

Olexa Harbuziuk became pastor of Cornberg’s Ukrainian Baptist congregation in 1946. According to his son Alex’s biography, he also edited the monthly magazine Doroha Pravdy, meaning The Way of Truth. Stebelsky’s list of two parishes is therefore not a complete inventory of every form of religious life represented in the camp.

Music connected the community with Ukrainians elsewhere. The Harbuziuk family collection identifies the Cornberg choir singing at a baptismal service in Korbach on 4 April 1948. The service took place in Korbach, while the singers came from Cornberg.

The camp’s own paper, Chuzhynoiu, describes how the Plast troop of the Cornberg camp, the Yevhen Konovalets Plast Kish, marked 14 March 1946, the seventh anniversary of the proclamation of the independence of Carpatho-Ukraine. At six in the evening the scouts gathered quickly as one and formed up in a square by troops on the school ground; the troop leaders reported to the camp marshal and he to their guardian, the standard-bearer and two scouts carried out the blue and yellow flag, and the anthem “Shche ne vmerla Ukraina” was sung. In the school hall the troop’s guardian, the engineer Mr Kalynovych, gave a recollection titled “March days in Transcarpathia, 1939”; two minutes’ silence was kept for the 2,700 Sich riflemen who had died a brave death for the freedom of Carpatho-Ukraine; the scouts B. Bidiak, Ya. Holovka and Vira Dolyniuk recited poems; and the meeting closed with the scouts’ own anthem, “Hei plastuny”.

The Hrynenko family

Anna Maria Zinkewycz and Michael Hrynenko married at Cornberg on 25 October 1946. Their family’s photograph shows the bride and two accompanying men walking beside the settlement’s houses as other residents look on. The family identifies Anna Maria as coming from Lubaczow and Michael from Rozdol in the Lviv region.

A second family photograph shows Michael holding their two-year-old son Roman at Cornberg in 1949. The family dates it to the period just before their journey to Manitoba, Canada. Marriage and childhood in the camp became part of a family history that continued across the Atlantic.

Leaving Cornberg

In April 1949, Hasenau expected the Ukrainian community to depart on 29 April. The letter records an intended departure, not a confirmed date for everyone’s removal. The municipality gives 1 June 1949 as the date the settlement was released again; the local history also places the end of camp use in June. That administrative release does not establish when each former household actually returned.

Cornberg became an independent municipality in 1954. Objects from the Ukrainian church continued in use beyond the camp years. The church account describes a memorial stone commemorating 350 years of union between the Ukrainian Church and Rome, with Ukrainian, German and English inscriptions. It associates St. Volodymyr’s Ukrainian Church with the date 27 July 1947.

The barracks church burned down in summer 1956. Its 1947 steel bell continued to ring in the new Catholic church until November 1960, according to the local church account reproduced in the family collection. The surviving identification plaque names St. Wolodimir’s Ukrainian Church in Cornberg and gives 27 July 1947 and 1960.

Graves and memories

Not every resident lived to leave Cornberg. The local history records the deaths of 45 adults and 22 children during the camp years and their burial in its cemetery. It describes a redesign in 1987 as the old stones deteriorated, with some Cyrillic-inscribed stones preserved behind the cemetery chapel and in the sandstone museum.

Personal accounts also preserve the camp’s history. The Shevchenko Scientific Society Archives catalogues a collection assembled by Juchym Charczenko, a former head of Cornberg’s camp administration. Its description lists memoirs, photographs, correspondence and later writings through 1990—a record of remembering the community long after the camp closed.