Nova Howerla

Registration and administration

The Arolsen inventory registers the camp as Nowa-Howerla at Neumarkt in the Upper Palatinate, opening on 28 November 1945 and closing on 22 July 1949. Its recorded nationalities are Ukrainian and Polish. Its assembly-centre number was AC 93-260, which became NBO 429 from September 1948.

It was administered by UNRRA Team 56 at Neumarkt, with Fuller recorded as team director from January 1946 and Matthews as field supervisor. From November 1946 it fell under the area teams at Nuremberg and Weiden within the Amberg area A 4. No capacity figure is recorded for the camp at any date.

The same team administered other Ukrainian sites that must be kept separate from this one: an administration centre at Neumarkt which closed in the spring of 1947, the Drummond camp with a recorded capacity of 1,420, a group of Ukrainians living privately at Neumarkt, Princeton at Pollanten and Markville at Forchheim. Their registrations and figures belong to them.

The camp’s own newsletter

The Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences catalogued an issue of Holos Hoverli dated 19 December 1945. Its description identifies a mimeographed information weekly for residents of the Ukrainian settlement Nowa Howerla in Neumarkt. This records the camp community using its own publication early in the postwar period.

Population through 1946 and 1947

The comparative returns record 1,406 Ukrainians in the UNRRA summary of 24 August 1946, 1,001 in the UNRRA summary of 31 May 1947 and 929 in the summary compiled for the Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organisation on 2 January 1948. Stebelsky also gives 1,067 from questionnaires collected during 1946 and 1947, without a single reporting date.

These are four separate observations made by different bodies and not a count of everyone who passed through the camp. Stebelsky’s narrative places Neumarkt among the largest Ukrainian camps in the zone, at over 1,000 people.

A sports society from the first winter

The Munich almanac of the Ukrainian Council for Physical Culture records that the society Burevii was founded at Neumarkt on 6 December 1945 in the Ukrainian camp Nova Howerla, which it gives as having 1,020 inhabitants, and that sporting activity had already been carried on in the camp since August of that year. Its chairmen were Osyp Kliuk and Mykhailo Sharan, with Yurii Dytso and Oleksander Muts also active.

The society ran nine sections: gymnastics, football, men’s volleyball, table tennis, athletics, chess, boxing and skiing. Its football team played in the regional class and took second place in 1947. The almanac’s separate survey of the zone’s football names Burevii, dated 15 August 1945, as one of the four oldest Ukrainian teams in the American zone.

The almanac’s figure of 1,020 inhabitants is its own undated count for the camp and is not one of the UNRRA or IRO returns. It is close to the 1,001 Ukrainians recorded in the UNRRA summary of 31 May 1947 but was not compiled on the same basis.

A gathering place for Plast

In 1947, Na slidi described Neumarkt as a regular meeting place for Plast camps and courses. Rail connections, a suitable woodland clearing beside Nova Howerla and a supportive camp administration helped make this possible. A spring training gathering brought 54 boys from groups across the Regensburg scouting area. They practised pioneering, campcraft, signalling, athletics, tracking, knots and rescue skills.

Residents at the campfire

On 16 April 1947 the scouts held a public campfire for Nova Howerla residents. A separate St George celebration began with a church service and continued with songs, recitations, monologues and sketches at the scouting ground beside the camp. The report notes a large attendance by residents who were not themselves scouts. These gatherings brought organised youth activity into the wider community’s social life.

School and worship across camp boundaries

Former Drummond resident Oleksander Kobasa recalled that his camp’s school-age children attended school at nearby Nova Howerla, which he placed in woodland about half a kilometre from Neumarkt. Drummond’s small number of children did not support its own school. His memoir also names Osakivskyi from Nova Howerla as Drummond’s choirmaster and Father Toma Baryliak as the priest who came each Sunday to celebrate services there.

Letters from a Ukrainian camp at Neumarkt

Two letters written from a Ukrainian camp at Neumarkt in 1947 survive in a family history collection. In September the writer described living in wooden barracks in a camp about two kilometres from the town and separated from it by forest, with about 700 people from Ukraine, some working inside the camp and some in German factories, and with himself and his wife teaching in the camp school. In December he described people leaving little by little for Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada and work in England, with others hoping for Venezuela, the United States, Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.

The collection heads these letters simply as Neumarkt and does not say which of the town’s Ukrainian camps the writer lived in. Both Nova Howerla and Drummond were open on that date, and the distance he gives does not match the half a kilometre recorded in the Drummond memoir for Nova Howerla. They are evidence about Ukrainian camp life at Neumarkt rather than about this camp in particular.

Searching from a camp address

In June 1948, residents used Nova Howerla as a return address for searches published in the Paris Ukrainian journal Hromada. Wasyl Sulima sought Wasyl Rachkovsky, giving Neumarkt and “Nowa Howerla” in his address. On the following page, Matwij Lopuszanski sought Henryk Liutostavsky and likewise named the camp. These small notices connect the camp to the wider effort to find people separated by war. They establish published contact addresses, rather than proving the whereabouts of the people being sought.

Transfers and departure

Kobasa dates Drummond’s dissolution to summer 1948, during overseas resettlement, and recalls that residents who had not emigrated moved to Nova Howerla. The two facilities remained distinct even as people, schooling and religious services linked them.

The inventory gives a closing date of 22 July 1949. A 2025 historical study by Leonid and Liudmyla Kushnir, citing United States congressional hearings, places the closure by 30 September 1949. The administrative date is the more precise of the two and the study’s date is consistent with it.