When we speak about the Holocaust we refer to millions of victims, but the numbers are almost too big to comprehend.
Each of those fatalities had a name, a place and a life, however short and cruelly curtailed. There is no reminder or confirmation of what happened to my aunt, uncle and cousins apart from these words. They were just another family, thrown into an unmarked grave in a desolate field. Another group of victims denied the respect of remembrance.
Death, I learned quickly, offered no protection from the inhumanity of our oppressors, who decided to build an Arbeitslager, a slave labour camp, in Plaszow, a southern suburb of Krakow, on the site of two Jewish cemeteries. Jerozolimska was the oldest, having been established in 1887. The second was barely ten years old, and had a beautiful Ohel, a form of tomb built in the Byzantine style.
The Nazis were not content with taunting and killing the living. They refused to let the dead rest. Dozens of us were ordered to line up behind huge earth movers, which levelled the headstones and gouged out the graves. It was my job to shovel up remains — bones, skulls, teeth and scraps of humanity — into a wheelbarrow pushed by someone who ran along to my left. Everything had to be done at speed; we were shouted at, whipped across the back and shoulders, and threatened with being shot if we paused or stopped. The disturbed bodies, or what was left of them, were dumped into a hastily dug hole and covered with earth. The sights and smells of such desecration were revolting, and our ears rang with constant abuse, but we were learning not to think, never to question or register emotion.
If we had done so at the time, we would have realised that even the subsequent use of the headstones was a calculated insult. They were recycled as paving slabs, set in front of administrative offices, and used to form pathways to the homes of SS officers. The camp originally covered 25 acres of rocky ground, which was marshy in places. By the time it became a fully fledged concentration camp, in January 1944, it had grown to eight times the size. Eventually it housed 25,000 prisoners, ten times the number it was initially designed to take. We initially lived in tents on the cemetery grounds, and were joined by gangs of slave labourers, the so-called Barrackenbau Jews, who commuted from the Krakow ghetto during the early stages of its liquidation.
They told us, in snatched conversations, of persecution and starvation beyond our imaginations.
No one mentioned the obvious, that we were building our own prison. We merely prayed that we would not be killed when we were surplus to requirements. We dug out the sewage system, helped build wooden barracks, and tied barbed wire around nails with our bare hands to form double fencing, which, when the camp was fully extended, measured nearly four kilometres.
We cemented wooden poles in at regular intervals; the guards patrolled a five-metre corridor between the wires. Machine guns were installed in watchtowers. You may be aware of a Hollywood version of the camp, as depicted in the movie Schindler’s List. This was created in the nearby Liban Quarry, which also served as a labour camp for Poles between 1942 and 1944, where typhus and malaria were rife. The life expectancy of prisoners was measured in weeks.
Steven Spielberg’s film set included 34 replica barrack blocks and watchtowers, remnants of which can still be seen alongside the genuine artefacts, such as an abandoned gunpowder warehouse, rusty machinery, fence posts, and triangles of barbed wire. Graffiti artists have somehow scaled the refinery towers. One scrawled message simply says: “I care about you.”
The quarry was designated as a protected ecological area in 2022; it is largely overgrown and unstable. Waterfowl nest on hidden ponds, and birds of prey soar above limestone cliffs.
It extends to the boundary of the former concentration camp. The movie captured the menace of that place, the sense of emptiness and hopelessness it was designed to generate, and the crimes that were perpetrated within.
Today it is also a nature reserve, with thinly wooded hills and open, scrubby grassland. Only the stone entrance arch remains.
I shuddered as I stood beneath it on my recent return, because I felt the force of its secrets. As one of the signs on the perimeter says, “Please respect the grievous history of this site”.
‘The Survivor: How I Survived Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter’ by Josef Lewkowicz with Michael Calvin (Bantam Press, £20)
