Orlyk Camp

The barracks before the camp

Work on the barracks at Strub began in September 1937 to designs by the Munich architect Bruno Biehler. The II Battalion of Gebirgsjägerregiment 100 moved in on 11 November 1938. French and American troops occupied the site on 4 May 1945, and it was afterwards used to house displaced persons. The German army returned in July 1957, and the buildings were named the Jägerkaserne on 17 June 1967.

Arriving from other camps

Research based on the camp’s first journal issue records 1,842 people arriving from Karlsfeld in three transports, on 13, 15 and 20 May 1946. Forty-one came from the international Insula camp on 11 June and 179 from the Polish Kościuszko camp at Bad Reichenhall on 16 June; others were admitted on individual application. The study gives the camp’s population at that point as 2,059. The opening ceremony was held on 2 June 1946, after the first arrivals.

Unlike most of the assembly centres in the American zone, Orlyk was wholly Ukrainian. Its residents came from every part of the country and from a wide range of ages, trades and social backgrounds, and the study treats the task of governing so mixed a group as the camp administration’s first problem.

Governing the camp

A management board headed by Toma Lapychak ran the camp, answerable to general assemblies of residents and to elections contested by three groupings: a non-party civic union, a non-party workers’ and peasants’ list, and the society of Ukrainian political prisoners. Lapychak also edited the camp’s journal.

Professional life reorganised itself around associations. The study records a teachers’ community of 62 members, a medical section of eleven doctors, an association of engineers and technicians with 60 members, and a group of foresters and woodworkers numbering twenty.

Running a small town

Orlyk’s surviving records reveal the practical organisation behind the settlement. Correspondence linked its council with local organisations and the American military administration. Budgets, receipts and payroll records document the management of services, while health and welfare papers and a law-and-order committee show how ordinary needs were handled.

Radio scripts and communiqués provided ways to communicate with residents. School programmes and theatre broadsides record an organised cultural calendar. The archive also preserves material from the literary and artistic association MUR and the cultural-educational division of the central Ukrainian representation: the camp was connected to a much wider intellectual network.

Housing arrangements tried to keep families together: small rooms were prioritised for families with young children and for sick residents, while larger rooms served as shared dormitories. The Samopomich cooperative, established on 1 June 1946, offered another form of practical self-organisation. It had 811 members by 24 June and had gathered 8,272 marks in shares and entrance fees. It ran a shop selling food at small mark-ups to hold down black-market prices, worked with knitting workshops in the camp, and sold off the beer left behind by the barracks’ previous occupants — 2,850 litres of it by 24 June 1946.

Both a Greek Catholic and an Orthodox church served the camp, each with its own choir: Trembita with 32 singers and Boyan with 42. A literary and artistic club founded on 22 June 1946 ran sections for writers and journalists, theatre, scholarship, music and the visual arts, and kept its own library. The camp theatre’s first production, Mirandolina, opened on 15 June 1946.

A school carried from Karlsfeld

The secondary school continued an institution begun in Munich and Karlsfeld. It had been founded in July 1945 under Volodymyr Radzikevych, reached 562 pupils in the 1945–46 school year and had 42 teachers by November 1945. After Karlsfeld closed it moved to Berchtesgaden, where in 1946–47 it taught 226 students outside the camp, in the area called Zaporizhzhia. In 1947–48 it occupied a block of nine classrooms. Its final director, from 1949 to 1950, was Vasyl Stetsiuk.

The school-leaving examination was taken by 123 pupils in 1945–46, while the school was still at Karlsfeld, then by 59 in 1946–47, 21 in 1947–48 and 29 in 1948–49; 232 pupils graduated in all. Departures brought teaching to an end in 1950.

The secondary school was one of several. In its first weeks the camp also ran an elementary school of five classes with 106 pupils, a commercial school with 55, a girls’ vocational school with 23, a kindergarten with 73 children, a music school with 55 pupils and an art studio with nine.

Sport and youth organisations

The Ukrainian Sports Club Orlyk was founded in June 1946 within the Ukrainian Council for Physical Culture. The society had about 250 members, senior and junior football teams and men’s and women’s volleyball teams, while Plast enrolled 266 young people in eight groups.

Harvard’s collection preserves correspondence, minutes, financial records and diplomas, alongside material from the school and Plast scouts. Exchanges with the Zaporizhzhia club in Aschaffenburg place local activity within a network of camp sport.

Harvard also identifies political, student, musical and theatre groups at the camp. Sport was therefore one part of a broader community infrastructure that offered residents education, collective activity and a sense of continuity while permanent settlement remained uncertain.

A magazine reaches beyond the camp

The magazine Orlyk appeared from June 1946 to April 1948: 22 numbered issues in 21 instalments. It was produced at first by cyclostyle at the camp and later printed by Stanislav Sliusarchuk’s press in Munich. Its early focus on camp life broadened from the sixth issue into a monthly forum for cultural and social discussion, and it kept its editorial independence from the camp administration.

Contributors included the scholars Leonid Bilets’kyi, Yurii Boiko-Blokhin, Petro Holubenko and Borys Krupnyts’kyi; the magazine also printed verse by Yurii Lypa, Oleh Olzhych and Olena Teliha, together with press reviews, book notices and a cultural chronicle. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine names Ostap Hrytsai as editor of the literary monthly, while the Ostroh Academy study identifies Toma Lapychak as editor-in-chief.

The camp also published an illustrated catalogue for a Ukrainian art exhibition in 1946. Its Berchtesgaden-Strub imprint anchors the exhibition to this particular settlement. Another 1946 camp publication, Vatra, survives in the Ukrainian Museum-Archives periodicals collection, extending the evidence beyond a single magazine title.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine records Orlyk as one of ten Ukrainian periodicals licensed by the American military authorities, and dates its run from June 1946 to March 1948, a month earlier than the April 1948 closing date given by the Ostroh Academy study. Both give a total of 22 issues.

Writers at Strub

Writers, journalists and publicists lived at the camp. The novelist Katria Hrynevycheva died there and is buried in the town cemetery. The poet Andrii Harasevych, born in Lviv in 1917, had studied at Charles University in Prague, taught in a camp gymnasium and performed as a pianist; he was killed in a mountaineering accident near Berchtesgaden on 24 July 1947.

What survived the camp years

Archives now preserve different parts of Orlyk’s life: Harvard’s holdings are particularly strong on sport, while the Shevchenko collection covers administration and cultural activity. The school’s anniversary book preserves photographs and educational history. Together they connect the buildings at Strub with institutions that continued in emigrant communities overseas.

Two further holdings of the Shevchenko Scientific Society bear on the camp. Its archives hold the Volodymyr Doroshenko papers, many of whose items relate to DP Camp Orlyk, together with the minutes of two meetings of the Uchytelska hromada in Philadelphia in 1952. Its library in New York holds the camp archives for 1945 to 1950 published on four CD discs, catalogued as not for loan.