Karlova Ves Refugee Camp

A village on the city’s edge

Karlova Ves was not yet part of Bratislava. Founded in 1780 by Count Karol Jozef Hieronym Pálffy and named after him, it had been a hamlet of Devín and remained a wine-growing village, its people also working at the Patrónka cartridge factory of 1871 and the city waterworks of 1886. When Germany occupied Devín on 24 November 1938 Karlova Ves became a municipality in its own right, and in early February 1939 its inhabitants asked to be joined to Bratislava. That was granted only by a Ministry of the Interior decree of 2 December 1943.

The old village that stood here was demolished from 1964 for blocks of flats.

Who kept arriving

The camp did not hold a fixed group, and the people at Karlova Ves were not only the soldiers of March. In April and May 1939, while the camp was still at the Danube barracks, Sich members reached Bratislava singly and in groups, among them men whom the Hungarian authorities had held in camps and released half alive, together with transports of Ukrainians expelled from Carpathian Ukraine. In June and July the arrivals were workers and peasants who could no longer bear Hungarian rule and could find no work at home, and young men taken for the Hungarian army who did not want to serve. In the last days before the appeal was written, Ukrainians were also coming from Galicia, where the commandant said new persecutions had begun.

He put the rate at an average of ten new refugees a month from Carpathian Ukraine, and expected the movement to grow after the harvest, when people who had gathered their grain would leave rather than starve.

Daily life

Residents rose at six, exercised, cleaned the barracks and attended military instruction. Meals centred on bread, soup and preserved food. The command’s appeal sought clothing, footwear, travel documents, rail fares and fuel. Food and shelter alone could not meet the needs of people arriving with few possessions.

The commandant set out the day in full. After the six o’clock rise came physical drill and a breakfast of coffee or cocoa with bread, then the tidying of the barracks and yard, then military exercises. Dinner at twelve was a single dish, a bean, pea or potato soup or another cooked with tinned food. The hours to two were free for washing and rest. From two until six came military training, lectures on military subjects and talks on the history of the Ukrainian armed struggle. Supper at six was tea with bread and tinned food or jam, the evening until nine was free, and the camp mounted its own guard.

Slovak garrison commanders inspected the camp. The most recent inspection before the appeal was made by Colonel Bodický, commander of the Bratislava garrison, who issued an order thanking the Ukrainian camp command for the order and discipline he found there.

The visit of 12 July 1939

On 12 July 1939 the barracks were visited by Professor Dr Oleksander Hranovsky and the engineer Volodymyr Kossar, described in the report as presidents of the Organisation for the Rebirth of Ukraine in America and Canada. Hranovsky taught entomology at the University of Minnesota and led that organisation from 1935 to 1963, which is why the appeal survives among the emigration papers held at his university. Kossar was a leading figure of the Ukrainian National Federation in Canada.

On the day of the visit the camp supported 180 people. Of these, 112 both lodged and ate in the barracks; the rest were families who ate in the camp but slept in private lodgings. Apart from food and accommodation, the commandant wrote, the camp received no other assistance from anyone.

What the camp asked for

The appeal was addressed to Ukrainians in the United States and Canada, because the emigration in Europe was itself in hard circumstances. Men reaching the camp from Hungarian prisons arrived almost naked and barefoot and could not be sent to work in that state, so the camp needed clothing, linen and footwear or the money to buy them, together with money for refugees’ photographs and visa fees and for rail fares from the border to Bratislava, so that men did not wander Slovakia for weeks begging. Heating and lighting for the barracks was named as the coming urgent need, with a reserve of warm clothing and an information bulletin for the refugees in the camp and at work. The commandant gave no estimates of cost, promising instead that whatever was sent would be accounted for monthly.

A wider Ukrainian setting

Bratislava already had a Ukrainian community with cultural, professional and student organisations. The Commercial Academy evacuated from Transcarpathia operated in the city during 1939–1940. This educational continuity formed part of the same displacement landscape, although the academy and its students’ accommodation were separate from the Karlova Ves barracks.