Jaworzno

A site with successive regimes

The German authorities had established Neu-Dachs, an Auschwitz subcamp, in June 1943 to supply labour to local coal mines. Electrified fencing enclosed residential huts and service buildings. Exhausting work, poor conditions and selections of prisoners deemed unfit for labour were central to its operation. In January 1945 many prisoners were forced on a long evacuation march towards Gross-Rosen.

In 1945 the new Polish authorities reused the German camp infrastructure for COP Jaworzno. The Ukrainian section belonged to this later institution, under different authorities. After the labour camp’s closure in 1949 the site was rebuilt for a prison for young political prisoners, followed by a central prison that closed in 1956.

Conversion into a prison began in June 1949. The experimental prison for young political prisoners worked from 1951 to 1955 and closed, as the Central Prison at Jaworzno, in August 1956.

The decision of April 1947

The Politburo of the Polish Workers’ Party decided on 29 March 1947 to resettle the Ukrainian population, and on 23 April 1947 to create a transit camp for suspected Ukrainians inside the Jaworzno camp. The first transport reached it on 9 May 1947. Instructions signed on 25 April 1947 by Lieutenant Colonel Józef Czaplicki of the Ministry of Public Security ordered county offices to scatter arriving families and recruit informers among them.

Operation Vistula and detention

Operation Vistula followed the earlier forced movement of Ukrainians from Poland to Soviet Ukraine. In 1947 the authorities deported about 150,000 Ukrainians and Lemkos within Poland instead. Jaworzno was a detention destination within that campaign; it was not the destination of every deported family.

Security officers screened deportees at collection points, searching for suspected links to the Ukrainian underground and recruiting informants. Suspects could be sent to Jaworzno. Suspicion and collective responsibility shaped this process: detention did not mean that everyone held had been convicted of an offence.

People reached the section by arrest on a charge of collaboration with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, often fictitious, or by selection out of deportation transports at the filtration point at Oświęcim.

Inside the Ukrainian section

No separate camp was built. The Ukrainians were held in a fenced off part of the Central Labour Camp, barracks 8 to 15: women in barracks 8 and 9, men in barracks 10 to 14, and barrack 15 used for interrogations. These were run by a special investigative group of the Ministry of Public Security with soldiers of the Internal Security Corps. The commandants were Captain Stanisław Kwiatkowski and, from March 1948, Lieutenant Teofil Hazelmajer.

A Ukrainian historical encyclopaedia describes the ground the detention inherited: fifteen wooden barracks and several brick buildings on 6.6 hectares, the barracks fitted with triple-tiered plank bunks, the whole enclosure ringed by a double row of barbed wire and twelve guard towers with machine guns and searchlights.

Conditions, work and food

Conditions are recorded for the camp as a whole rather than the Ukrainian section alone: severe overcrowding, with a Red Cross delegation in December 1947 finding prisoners sleeping two to a bed, and prisoners hired out to Silesian and Kraków collieries.

Hunger dominates the published testimony of Father Mitrate Stepan Dzyubyna, a Greek Catholic priest held in the camp: “The most painful was the hunger. We were constantly hungry, dry as ghosts... All this led to the condition that after four months, prisoners were swelling from hunger, falling lifeless during the morning roll call. Sometimes, several corpses were carried out in one roll call.”

The same account records violence as a daily reality for the imprisoned Ukrainians: beatings during meal distribution, in the washroom and while queuing for the toilet, and above all during interrogations, from which prisoners could return with broken ribs, knocked-out teeth and torn-off fingernails.

Prisoners and losses

The Ukrainian section held people subjected to harsh interrogation and damaging living conditions. Published research records thousands passing through it and more than 160 deaths. The detained community included Greek Catholic and Orthodox clergy, whose imprisonment also disrupted the religious life of the displaced population.

Published totals differ: the Institute of National Remembrance gives almost 4,000 held, 162 deaths and 27 clergy, 22 Greek Catholic and five Orthodox, while the Jaworzno museum portal gives 3,871 and 161. Indictments were drawn against 547 people, who were sent to the prison in Kraków. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, cited in a 2025 press account, gives close to 4,000 imprisoned and around 200 deaths attributed to torture.

Release did not restore the old life

A reduction in pressure on Ukrainians was ordered in November 1947, and releases from Jaworzno followed in early spring 1948. Returning to a home village remained restricted. Some former prisoners received permission, while people returning without authorisation could be removed again. For many families, release therefore meant joining a dispersed community rather than recovering the life they had left.

More than two thousand decisions to discontinue proceedings were ready by September 1947, yet most of those concerned were held for nearly another year. Releases began at the end of December 1947 and more than 3,000 people had left by March 1948. The section closed formally on 8 January 1949.

Deaths and the burial ground

The camp’s dead were buried first in the parish cemetery in Jaworzno and later in woodland south west of the Jan Kanty colliery. Published totals for the whole camp and its subordinate sites vary widely and are not a measure of the Ukrainian section.

Preserving the history

The city museum’s permanent exhibition, opened in 2014, brought together original objects from successive periods: a German-era prisoner uniform, a COP prisoner’s rosary, concrete fence posts and barbed wire. Reconstructions helped explain the buildings while preserving the distinction between original objects and recreated settings. The exhibition presents the camp’s changing institutions as a connected history of one site.

A monument at the burial ground was unveiled on 23 May 1998 in the presence of Presidents Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Leonid Kuczma, with tablets in Polish, Ukrainian and German. Commemorations are held each September with the Association of Ukrainians in Poland.