Conditions in the DP Camps
Displaced Poles undertook community-building efforts immediately after liberation. Both SHAEF and UNRRA provided an organizational framework, but grassroots initiatives accounted for the spontaneous creation of the first Polish communities, which mushroomed all over Germany despite very difficult conditions. One of those in charge of organizing a DP camp was Wacław Sterner, an officer of the Polish Home Army and a soldier in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. Captured after the suppression of the uprising, he was a prisoner in the German Oflag in Sandbostel until its liberation in May 1945. The British military authorities appointed Sterner komendant (officer in charge) of a hastily assembled displaced persons camp in Buchhorst, which housed over five hundred Poles and small groups of French and Hungarians. People found refuge in the chambers of a brick factory’s blast furnace and in the unwalled wooden shelters used for drying bricks. Sterner remembered that in those first weeks
People camped there like nomads, in conditions contrary to any basic human needs. . . . There were no sanitary installations whatsoever. The entire area was covered by several dozen little campfires. Pots or kettles with water stood on bricks over [these fires] for people to prepare meals or warm water to wash or to do laundry. A striking sight was a large number of women. Taking advantage of the cloudless weather, they cooked, washed, sewed, and hurried around the grounds of the brick factory. Altogether it resembled a huge Gypsy camp.23
Another Polish former POW, Jan Michalski, spent the entire war in a German Oflag. He also was recruited for the post of DP camp komendant. His new assignment was Geesthacht: a large territory of shabby wooden barracks built for foreign workers around a munitions factory that had been almost completely destroyed by bombing. About two thousand Poles lived there along with a large group of Yugoslavs, also former slave laborers for the Reich. The camp was closed before winter because the barracks in Geesthacht and in neighboring Krümmel did not have any heating.24
Some DPs had more luck, if only temporarily. A third camp in that same area, in Spackenberg, boasted a clean and neat settlement of small one-story houses surrounded by little gardens, built before the war for young couples— members of the Hitlerjugend, the Nazi youth organization. The camp had a spacious old Kulturhaus (community center), which included guest rooms, a theater hall, and a large kitchen with adjoining dining hall.25 In terms of the general living conditions of Polish DPs, however, Spackenberg was the exception rather than the rule.
The largest Polish camp in Germany was Wildflecken, where more than twenty thousand Polish DPs lived at any given time. Truppenlager Wildflecken, hidden in the mountains and forests of northeast Bavaria, had been an SS training camp. It resembled a town made up of huge military facilities and covered an area of about fifteen square miles.26 Poles quartered there gave Wildflecken a new name, Durzyń, which derived from the name of the Durzyńcy, a Slavic tribe that had lived in that part of Bavaria in the fifth and sixth centuries AD before being pushed to the east by German tribes.27 The scale of operations in Durzyń can be illustrated by just one example: the camp bakery prepared more than nine tons of bread daily.28 At Durzyń UNRRA/IRO worker Kathryn Hulme was struck by the bleakness of the large rooms filled with dozens of iron beds assigned for single men. Other halls were partitioned with stacked-up luggage to create family cubicles. Families who shared such quarters usually hung army blankets to make additional “dividing walls.” Hulme saw those “khaki labyrinths” as “the last ramparts of privacy to which the DP’s clung, preferring to shiver with one less blanket on their straw-filled sacks rather than to dress, comb their hair, feed the baby or make a new one with ten to twenty pairs of stranger eyes watching every move.”29
Another large Polish refugee community in Germany was formed in Haren on the river Ems, where the Polish First Armored Division was stationed, after the British authorities expelled the German population from the town. In June 1945 Haren was renamed Maczków in honor of the revered commander in chief, General Stanisław Maczek. Between 1945 and 1947, when the division was transferred to Great Britain, an entirely Polish town council governed a population consisting of military personnel and their families as well as civilian DPs. The town boasted its own Roman Catholic parish as well as its own schools, theater, publishing house, police, fire brigade, and hospital. Maczków earned the name “the capital of Little Poland,” the state in exile created by Polish refugees in occupied Germany. In the American zone of Austria, the Polish camp in Ebensee played a similar role.30
The training centers of the Polish Guard Companies (Kompanie Wartownicze) in the American zone in Germany were a different type of large Polish DP community. These units, employing DPs and organized in a military fashion, were formed in 1945 to relieve American soldiers from some of their occupation duties, such as guarding military supplies, constructing and conserving airfields, and maintaining military installations and vehicles. By the fall of 1945, 75,000 Polish men were employed in these formations. Between 1946 and 1947 the number fluctuated around 40,000, and dropped to about 11,500 in March 1948. The mere existence of Polish Guards units became a bone of contention between the Polish government in exile and the Soviet Union, which saw them as hampering repatriation. The Soviets even accused the Guards of housing “fascist elements” among the DPs. In order to accommodate these protests and to emphasize the civilian character of the units, the American military changed the color of the guards’ uniforms from khaki to black and replaced badges bearing the word “Poland” with the letters “CG” (Civilian Guard).31
The training center for Polish Guards in Mannheim-Kafertal (named “Kościuszko” by the Guards) distinguished itself with its high degree of internal organization and activism, encouraged and facilitated by the American military. The Polish Guards published their own newspaper, Ostatnie Wiadomości (Latest News), and, due to their secure pay, could sustain many cultural and social initiatives. The financial basis of the Guards’ activities was the Fundusz Społeczny (Social Fund), which collected 2 percent of the Guards’ salary. Money from the fund supported numerous causes, such as DP welfare funds and Polish schools.32
In general, living conditions in Polish DP camps varied in different locations throughout the entire DP period. For example, a report on the camps in northern Bavaria prepared in November 1947 for the Polish Union in Germany revealed multiple problems with housing for Polish DPs. The authors of the report indicated that only one camp, in Coburg, had decent housing. At the Amberg military base, the buildings were dirty, worn out, lacking adequate sanitary installations, and very overcrowded. Wooden barracks at the Weiden and Hohenfels camps were unsuitable for winter weather.33 Moreover, frequent transfers from camp to camp hurt DPs and became a source of frustration and bitterness:
DPs transferred to a different camp almost always get buildings in condition not suitable for living. Making them into adequate living quarters requires a lot of work and money. Recently, just a month ago, relatively well-organized camps from Auerbach and Flossenburg were transferred to the dirty and damaged military buildings in Amberg, with electrical installations destroyed, toilets clogged, pipes and taps in bathrooms partially missing, huge and undivided halls for families to live in, and no outlets for stoves to heat the halls during the coming winter.34
Population transfers from camp to camp were the scourge of refugee existence. At first, UNRRA moved DPs as camps were established and reorganized. After UNRRA launched its repatriation action, however, DPs interpreted frequent moves as a not-so-subtle attempt to make their lives so unbearable that they would volunteer to return to Poland. DPs charged that UNRRA officials tried to unsettle and destroy DP community structures to compel them to repatriate, and complained of UNRRA’s abuse of power and mistreatment of refugees.35 Unfortunately, the ordeal did not end after the IRO took over, although transfers from camp to camp lost their political dimension. Now camps were being closed and consolidated because of emigration. New transition camps functioned as temporary stops in which DPs waited for emigration processing.
Next to living conditions, food was the issue that was of utmost importance