Jaworzno concentration camp
The camp, known as SS-Arbeitslager Neu-Dachs (often also called SS-Lager Dachsgrube), provided forced labor for the German war industry.
[2] By the time the camp began its operations, the local Jews of Jaworzno (a population of about 3,000 before the war) and of the rest of Poland had already been mostly exterminated.
There were 14 reported successful escapes, including several Soviet POWs who then joined the local Polish communist partisans.
Every month about 200 inmates who were unable to work anymore, were taken by truck from Jaworzno to the gas chambers at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, resulting in several thousand more deaths.
On the night of January 15, 1945, the camp was bombed by the Soviet Air Force as the front approached.
Hundreds of them died on the way to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia, including about 300 who were shot dead in a massacre which occurred on the second night of this death march.
[4] The abandoned camp was infiltrated on January 19, 1945, by the local unit of the Polish resistance organization Armia Krajowa (AK).
The camp for Germans was run until 1949, when the last of them were allowed to leave and emigrate from their home region to post-war Germany.
The prisoners mostly worked on the construction site of the Jaworzno power plant or in nearby factories and mines.
One of the commandants (from 1949), was a Polish Jew and communist named Salomon Morel, who had gained a reputation for cruelty in the Zgoda labour camp in Świętochłowice.
On April 23, 1947, by a decree of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party, COP Jaworzno was selected for the detention of civilians during the Operation Vistula deportation campaign.
Most of them were people suspected of being sympathetic towards the rebels of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and those otherwise selected from the Operation Vistula transports.
Between 1951 and 1956, it was turned into the "progressive prison for adolescents" (Polish: Progresywne Więzienie dla Młodocianych) under the age of 21.
[13] A memorial dedicated in Polish to "the victims of Hitlerism 1939-1945" was erected on the site of the January 1945 mass execution of prisoners by the SS.
After the fall of communism in Poland, the monument was joined by a small commemorative plinth to the inmates of the political prison in the nearby primary school grounds.
