Hellbrunn Camp

A Polish and Ukrainian community

A surviving entrance board calls the site a Polish DP camp and gives Camp No. 19. The Salzburg provincial archive identified the board as Hellbrunn’s after it was found in the cellar of the Posthof. Its painted spelling, “Heilbrunn”, is a historical error preserved on the object.

The Polish designation did not mean that every resident was Polish. Archival population returns reproduced by historian Ihor Stebelsky record 887 Ukrainians at Hellbrunn on 30 September 1948 and 58 on 30 June 1950. These are Ukrainian counts on particular dates, not the camp’s entire population or cumulative arrivals.

The two returns show a substantial reduction in the recorded Ukrainian population during the main resettlement years. They cannot by themselves identify how many people emigrated, transferred to other camps or moved into local housing. Hellbrunn remained open long after the second count.

Administration and the argument over return

UNRRA administered the camp from the start, working as team 316 in the Salzburg district; the IRO took over the administration in 1947, and from 1952 the provincial government ran all the refugee camps in Salzburg. The difference in standards showed in the accounts: a camp under Austrian administration cost about 50 Schillings where an IRO camp cost about 110.

In 1946 there were 1,100 Poles and 700 Ukrainians in the camp, and Hellbrunn was one of the centres of Polish life in Austria. Repatriation became the year’s great point of dispute. The transports east came to a standstill during the winter of 1945 to 1946, and personal reasons, the political situation and a hardening anti-communist conviction lay behind most refusals to go. In 1947 some residents were moved to the Asten camp, wrote a protest letter to President Truman and were returned to Hellbrunn. After the peak of 4,000 people, the number of places was limited to 2,000 in 1947.

The IRO’s own files on the camp survive in the Archives nationales de France. The guide to those records by Yury Boshyk and Boris Balan lists, in series AJ 43, volume 983, a dossier of miscellaneous documents on the Hellbrunn camp including the series of “Instructions for internal camp use” running from August 1947 to March 1950. Hellbrunn’s dossier is listed separately from the file on the Jewish camps in Austria.

Making a home in the barracks

Privacy was scarce. Families partitioned the barracks with corrugated metal and fibreboard, sometimes creating fifteen living spaces inside one hut. Workshops supplied goods for residents and for sale, while three canteens served meals. Medical care developed to include a hospital, clinic and laboratory.

Work and welfare grew up alongside the huts. Some residents worked in the camp’s own workshops, whose products were not only for their own use but were also sold. Medical care was provided at first by the Red Cross and UNRRA, later by a hospital, a clinic and a laboratory, and meals were served in three canteens. The kindergarten and other facilities were maintained by private relief organisations, and cultural events were part of camp life. The compiled register of Austrian camps notes that the former barracks also held an old people’s home and a children’s home.

Photographs from 1948–1949 place family life among the wooden buildings. One shows parents with two children and a dog; another shows two men, one identified in its original caption as a Polish tailor. A further personal photograph, posted in 2022 by a man who spent the first two years of his life in the camp, shows him with his father there in late 1948 or early 1949; he recalled that he believed his parents had met at Hellbrunn after the war, and that the family left in 1949 for Canada. The images preserve ordinary relationships within a camp often remembered only through administrative numbers.

Separation and reunion

One former child resident recalled that illness prevented him from accompanying his Ukrainian family to the United States in 1949. He returned to Hellbrunn, where the family’s former barracks now accommodated children. Around ten shared his room, and a small group walked out to school each day.

His account continues through a nearby camp and a children’s home in Itzling before reunion with his family in the United States in October 1952. The sequence illustrates how medical difficulties and separate placements could prolong displacement for a child after the rest of the household had emigrated.

What is known of Ukrainian life here

Two kinds of Ukrainian figure survive for Hellbrunn: the count of 700 Ukrainians in 1946 and the IRO returns of 887 in September 1948 and 58 in June 1950. No Ukrainian school, parish or scout unit specific to this camp has been traced. Ukrainian scouting in the Salzburg area is recorded instead at the Lexenfeld camp, where teachers from the Ukrainian school founded Plast circles under the patronage of Austrian scouts from Salzburg, and the city itself became the Austrian headquarters of Plast in February 1948 and the place where its bulletins were printed. That was a different camp in the same city, and it should not be read back into Hellbrunn.

From international relief to permanent homes

UNRRA first administered Hellbrunn; IRO administration followed, then Austrian responsibility from 1952. The camp finally closed in May 1961 as residents emigrated or obtained housing. Its huts were removed.

The camp outlasted the resettlement years by a decade. By September 1953 the register records two Austrian establishments on the site, an old people’s home with 200 foreign-language residents and a welfare camp with 580 people, of whom 240 were foreign-language; administration is given as fully Austrian from the middle of 1958. The camp finally closed in May 1961. A United Nations photograph caption of 1958 records eighty refugees who had lived in the camp since the end of the Second World War, and who, it says, seemed condemned to remain unless a private campaign or group raised the money to finance their resettlement.

The surviving entrance sign and family photographs record different parts of that history: an official public identity, shared buildings and private lives. The provincial archive’s preservation of the sign makes it possible to connect an object recovered decades later with a named camp in the city.