Waterschei Camp

Barracks in a mining district

The settlement had developed around the coal mine. Its garden suburb, designed during the 1920s, housed mining employees; the company also maintained churches, schools and other communal buildings. The forced-labour barracks formed a different kind of accommodation within this company-dominated landscape.

In 1941 the German Reichsvereinigung Kohle placed the Limburg collieries in a regional division, Kempen-Bergbau, with its office at Hasselt. The announcement on 5 December 1941 that Russian prisoners would be sent to the pits came with an instruction to provide lodging: a single block close to the mine and ringed with barbed wire. No colliery had suitable buildings, so barracks camps were built to conditions set by Kempen-Bergbau. The Waterschei camp went up in the spring of 1942 near Steenbeukstraat.

The camp has since been demolished. A photograph reproduced by local historians shows wooden huts and a raised water tank, preserving a view of an otherwise vanished institution.

The first convoy

A convoy of 1,496 Soviet civilians reached Limburg in the summer of 1942, 702 of them allocated to Waterschei. About a third were seventeen or younger. Four days later the German authorities published the camp rules: musical instruments and a radio were allowed, wage tables applied, contact with the Belgian population was to be avoided, and each site was run by a camp commander.

A return for 18 July 1942 records 693 people in the camp, with 533 working in the mine. Illness, injury and duties inside the compound account for most of the others. These are whole-camp figures, not a Ukrainian subtotal. Kempen-Bergbau expected no more than three per cent non-producers; at Waterschei the figure was twenty-three per cent. On 21 July a first convoy of people judged unfit was sent back towards Germany, 150 of them from Waterschei.

In September 1942, as Soviet prisoners of war began to arrive at the other mining camps, the eastern civilians were moved together: those at Zwartberg to Waterschei, those at Eisden to Winterslag and Houthalen. From 21 October 1942 all of them were at Waterschei, and they stayed until the end of the occupation.

Working underground

Almost none of the deportees had seen a coal mine. Colliery managements were required to run short courses, with one instructor for every five men, and to work them in their own stalls as hewers and haulers. In the pit they were told apart by their lamps: straight lamps painted with white stripes, first down the shaft and last back up.

Wages were not handed over. Each man had a pay book in which a share of his earnings was entered every fortnight, to be spent in the camp canteen on fruit, beer, tobacco, writing materials, clothing, the cinema or a dentist. A former prisoner told Genk police that in the last year the men received about sixty francs a fortnight.

Food, punishment and sickness

Statements collected by Genk police in 1968 describe poor food, beatings and work imposed despite illness. One Ukrainian witness recalled violent punishment for taking soup. Other testimony records help given to prisoners by local resistance members.

The same statements name the guards. Flemish Guards and German staff supervised the compound. A Ukrainian witness, Kalina Jermalok, saw the camp chief strike men with a length of rubber hose and beat a Russian with a piece of wood for taking half a litre of soup. Polish survivors described blows with a rifle butt, beatings administered on a table, and men sent naked into a cellar of ice-cold water that a Russian prisoner later described to Jean Put as standing water with no sanitation.

Jean Put describes tuberculosis among weakened workers and treatment at the André Dumont clinic. A 1943 Red Cross report praised clinical care; this did not describe conditions throughout the camp. Twenty Russian workers died of the disease in Genk during the war, ten of them from Waterschei. The clinic’s secretary recalled a German order at the end of 1943 to list the unfit for repatriation, after which feverish patients were sent away in cattle wagons in midwinter.

Not every recorded cause of death can be taken at face value. In May 1945 a Waterschei mineworker lodged a complaint about a twenty-seven-year-old Ostarbeiter born at Kryvyi Rih who had been struck on the head with a shovel by an overseer. The mine doctor’s papers recorded skull fractures but gave the cause as a falling object in a mining accident; the Genk police officer who traced him treated it as a violent death. Jean Put’s list of deaths by camp gives twenty-six for Waterschei.

Transfers and the end of occupation

During the German retreat in September 1944, prisoners were taken towards Germany. Some eastern Europeans remained in the Genk region after the war, and their later settlement should be distinguished from the camp’s wartime function.

The buildings did not stand empty. After the liberation of Genk on 14 September 1944 arrested collaborators were held in the Waterschei and Zwartberg camps until December, and at the end of January 1945 both camps were taken over by officers and men of the American air force.

A Ukrainian parish at Waterschei

Ukrainians returned to Waterschei in a different capacity after the war, when the coal drive brought several thousand displaced people from Germany to the Limburg pits. Redemptorist priests founded the first congregations at Waterschei, Winterslag and Zwartberg about 1949 and 1950. From 1950 to 1963 a single priest served Genk and Zolder, given a miner’s house and a subsidy by the director of the André Dumont mine, and travelling between the communities at first by bicycle. Children were taught beside his terraced house on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons, in reading and writing, catechism, Ukrainian geography and history and church music. As families moved away the centres were reduced to three: Waterschei-Genk, Zolder and Eisden. In 1984 a former colliery lodging house at Waterschei was bought and converted into a church, consecrated in 1988.

A vanished camp, a surviving landscape

The wider mining landscape remains recognisable: the official heritage inventory records the garden suburb and major industrial buildings. The former mine now houses the Mijndepot museum.