Eisden–Lanklaar Camp

Workers brought from the east

In 1942 German authorities brought civilian forced workers from Ukraine and Belarus to the Limburg mines. Research on Eisden records 289 in its allocation. Later that year these workers were transferred to Waterschei and replaced by Soviet prisoners of war. The 289 is a combined group figure, not a count of Ukrainians alone.

The camp itself was built in the spring of 1942, north of the mine site on the left bank of the Zuid-Willemsvaart, on the road running from the colliery to the As–Lanklaar highway and its canal bridge. About twenty wooden huts stood inside a barbed-wire fence two metres high, each hut intended for a hundred men, with a wash hall, a dining hall and a lockable cupboard for each worker. Administratively the ground lay in the then municipality of Lanklaar.

The mine had considered using the old administration building, De Oude Burelen, for Eastern European forced workers. A separate camp was built instead. That decision matters when locating this history: the former offices, which retained other community uses, were not the Russisch Kamp.

The people who arrived in July 1942 were called Fremdarbeiter or russische Bergarbeiter in the German paperwork, but at Eisden they were spoken of as Ukrainians. Most were farmers, barely two per cent were miners and more than half were under twenty. On 21 July a first convoy of those judged unfit was sent back towards Germany, twenty-one of them from Eisden. From September 1942 they were replaced by prisoners of war selected from a collection camp in Saxony, and the Eisden contingent was made up in October with a further five hundred men. Between eighty and a hundred German soldiers guarded the camp, while Russians worked inside it as cobblers, barbers, nurses and kitchen hands, fetching bread from the colliery bakery in the Eisden garden suburb and milk from the mine tram stop.

Eisden became the largest of the seven Limburg camps. Jean Put’s tables record 1,042 men at the end of 1942, 1,268 a year later and 1,658 in August 1944; his list of deaths by camp gives twenty-nine for Eisden. Two of the men buried in the plot of honour at Genk died at Eisden, one of them born at Kryvyi Rih.

The Germans began clearing the camp on 1 September 1944, and on 3 September the inmates were marched off in columns by way of Lanklaar and Stokkem to the ferry at Meeswijk and on towards the German border. Some men had hidden underground with the help of free miners and waited for the liberation in the Eisden garden suburb.

From prison camp to emergency housing

The first convoy of German prisoners reached Eisden on 21 May 1945. They were confined in the barracks while working for the mine, and repatriated in 1947. The postwar coal drive then brought new contracted workers to Belgium, including displaced people from eastern Europe and migrants from Italy.

The barracks were converted into 263 emergency dwellings. A school, chapel, canteen and shop made the camp a place where families conducted everyday life. Many later residents of Eisden’s garden suburb had grown up there. The local heritage exhibition’s photograph shows the altered huts as homes, with doors, windows and a domestic scene outside.

This was a regional arrangement rather than a local improvisation. A mining heritage account records that from 1947 the prisoner-of-war barracks built by the Germans were used across the coalfield to house immigrants and their families, some 225 huts of timber and asphalt paper, to be demolished as other accommodation became available. They lasted far longer than intended: in 1958 there were still 257 families and 971 single men living in converted barracks at Genk, Lanklaar and Houthalen together.

Housing shortages and closure

The camp continued to serve successive waves of labour migration. An archive-based study describes accommodation for displaced people, Italians, Spaniards and Greeks before the old barracks were used for newly recruited Turkish miners. Poor housing was therefore a lasting part of the site’s history, rather than a condition confined to the immediate aftermath of war.

Investigators preparing a report on foreign workers found serious insanitary conditions. The mine’s management sought to prevent publication, but the article appeared in La Revue nouvelle in January 1965. The company closed the camp later that year. Its long survival shows how temporary wartime buildings could remain in use through decades of industrial recruitment.

A wider Ukrainian community

Ukrainian church history places Eisden within a network of postwar mining communities served by visiting clergy. At first priests came from the Netherlands; Eisden later remained one of three principal parish centres, alongside Waterschei-Genk and Zolder. This records community life in the mining district, without placing every parishioner inside the camp.

The site afterwards

Nothing of the camp survives. The ground it stood on was occupied until 2008 by the Bekaert Steelcord works and is now industrial land in Dilsen-Stokkem, the municipality that absorbed Lanklaar. The colliery’s own records did not survive either: when the closure of the mine was first discussed in 1968 the archive, which had been hidden behind a false wall in the attic of the management offices, was burnt in the furnace of the power station.