Winzer

Barracks beside a Danube town

The postwar camp used former Reich Labour Service accommodation. A compilation of Reich Labour Service unit locations lists two sections at Winzer an der Donau under the Vilshofen group in 1938 and notes that the two together formed a double camp, which is consistent with the local account of a substantial barrack site. Local historical research describes fifteen barracks, some of which were cleared when a transport of roughly four hundred survivors from Theresienstadt could not immediately be received in Deggendorf. The accommodation was inadequate for people who were ill, exhausted and frightened; its substantial fence brought distressing reminders of confinement.

Winzer was a separate stopping place from the Alte Kaserne camp in Deggendorf, about seventeen kilometres away. Accounts of movement between them should not turn the two places into one camp. Several surviving testimonies describe only a relatively short stay at Winzer before onward transfer.

Meals, English lessons and news of relatives

One survivor’s account places an arrival in June 1945. Residents slept in barracks and received meals through UNRRA. English lessons began for beginners and people with some existing knowledge; the person teaching also learned from others who had lived in Britain. Language learning was already part of preparing for life beyond the camp.

Communication with relatives mattered just as much as material support. The same account describes sending a telegram through a relative so that children abroad learned their parents were alive. In July the couple moved to Deggendorf, where letters and parcels arrived. Their eventual journey continued through Bremen to the United States in May 1946.

The later Ukrainian community

The administrative inventory identifies Ukrainians and Russians among Winzer’s residents and gives an accommodation capacity of 475 on 31 October 1947. This capacity is not a count of Ukrainians. The camp was attached to UNRRA Team 557 at Deggendorf and later used the IRO identifier NBO 417.

Ihor Stebelsky’s published table, which enters the camp as Deggendorf (Winzer), records 359 Ukrainians in the questionnaire returns collected during 1946 and 1947, 350 in the UNRRA summary of 31 May 1947 and 268 in the PCIRO summary of 2 January 1948. Winzer was therefore a small and remarkably stable community for two years before it began to thin out.

A page of family photographs and recollections assembled by former residents’ children shows what those few hundred people built. The images, dated by the contributors to 1946 to 1948, record a school and a kindergarten, a functioning church whose priest, A. Szczerban, appears in most of the wedding photographs, a choir, Christmas carollers, a camp police detachment, baptisms, theatrical performances and a stage commemoration at which a portrait of Taras Shevchenko was held up. One contributor’s only memory of her mother’s account of the camp is that they were always hungry.

A published Ukrainian family account describes reaching Winzer after forced labour and repeated fear of being sent back to Soviet territory. A child was born there in 1948. Family sponsorship eventually made emigration possible, and the family arrived in Boston in June 1949 before settling in New York. This is one documented route, rather than a claim that all Winzer residents left for the same country.

Winzer was also used for Ukrainian scouting. The Plast magazine Molode zhyttia for September 1948 lists the second training camp for cub and junior leaders of the Regensburg district as held at Winzer near Deggendorf from 4 to 14 July 1948, with twenty-three participants, and prints a photograph from it captioned “From the training camp at Winzer (1948): studying cartography”, showing the girls at work on a map in the open air below a ruined arcade.

Different routes out of Winzer

The testimony preserved by the Wiener Holocaust Library records another route: six weeks at Winzer, approximately a year in Deggendorf, then reunion with children in Britain in October 1946. One Ukrainian family recalled instead being moved in 1948 to the former SS Warner Kaserne in Munich, where they spent a year before leaving Germany, reaching the United States in 1949. Together, the accounts show that departure usually involved another camp and a further period of waiting before emigration.

The inventory records closure on 13 July 1949, and the IRO camp file for Winzer, AJ 43 820 item 31 in the French national archives, runs from October 1947 to July 1949. Family recollection that the camp was disbanded in 1948 describes when one household left rather than when the camp shut. The brief stay of the earliest Jewish survivors likewise should not be mistaken for the whole history of Winzer’s postwar camp.