The truth from beneath – how UPWr scientists discover secrets of the past

• Larger concentration camps, such as Gross-Rosen, had dozens or even hundreds of sub-camps operating alongside them, the locations of many of which are forgotten and waiting to be discovered.
• How do scientists discover forgotten burial sites? They use a number of methods – including remote sensing.
• Scientists are also assisted in their research at excavation sites by students as part of their internship or student science club.

The UN has designated January 27th as International Holocaust Remembrance Day – "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" said philosopher George Santayana. Remembrance is important – every year we lose witnesses to the painful past, which consequently opens the way for voices challenging the stories of survivors, and even Holocaust denialism. 

The project "Bioarchaeology and Archaeology of National-Socialist Repression Landscapes : A Central and Eastern European Perspective", led by Dr. Paweł Konczewski, was launched to provide a different perspective on the difficult past of totalitarian rule and the persecution that took place during the Second World War. The project is funded by the National Science Centre as part of the OPUS 22 +LAP programme, and is supported by Cellfast, who provided the team of scientists with a set of tools for archaeological and anthropological field research.

– We want to learn more about how German concentration camps actually functioned. Until recently, we had memory guardians who had survived the concentration camps, and who could tell us about the horrors of how they operated. Now there is a generational change and we see a disturbing tendency to relativise or disbelieve the stories of camp reality. Raising awareness among the next generations is therefore more important now than ever – stresses Dr. Konczewski, adding that the basis for questioning the Holocaust are often due to areas of scientific ignorance caused by the perpetrators trying to cover their tracks – murdering witnesses and destroying documentation. Missing archives mean that some of the past is forgotten and unaccounted for. 

The project therefore aims to complement and verify existing knowledge by combining human sciences with natural sciences – i.e. archaeology and biological anthropology. The project partner is the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, and the team leader from the Czech Republic is Assistant Professor Pavel Vařeka. The scientists will study one of the branches of the Flossenburg concentration camp, which was located near the town of Holýšov in south-western Bohemia.

Spreading like cancer 

Between 1941 and 1942 Gross-Rosen was a small labour camp, the inmates of which were made to extract granite from a nearby quarry. It was not until 1944 that the camp was at the forefront of a massive empire of sub-camps, which consisted of more than a hundred sites with different functions. During this period, Gross-Rosen was also a transfer point for tens of thousands of prisoners from camps evacuated from the east, i.e. territories occupied by the Third Reich, in the face of the approaching front. In her book 'The Empire of Small Hells', Joanna Lamparska writes about one of the forgotten Gross-Rosen subcamps located on the border between Poland and the Czech Republic – Sieniawka. According to her findings, the Angel of Death himself, Josef Mengele, fleeing the Red Army from Auschwitz to the west, reached the Gross-Rosen camp and carried out a selection of women for his research in his women's subcamps scattered along the former Polish-Czech border.

As Dr. Pawel Konczewski explains, while the history of Gross-Rosen is well recognised, the smaller branches scattered between Lower Silesia, Saxony and the Czech Republic have been somewhat forgotten. Polish and Czech teams of scientists will therefore focus on places excluded from the accounts of what happened in the German camps. Among other things they want to find and assess material evidence concerning the involvement of the Nazi 'camp landscape' in war production and military logistics, as the subcamps were closely linked to various industrial facilities and military installations. They will examine how these systems functioned, as well as explore the living and working conditions of the prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates and forced labourers.

This year the Czech team will mainly be working in the camp complex in Holýšov, where the Germans set up six prisoner-of-war camps for approx. 6,000 forced labourers producing ammunition. In 1944 a concentration camp for women was established there, which was then liberated on May 5th 1945 by the Polish Świętokrzyska Brigade. The camp commander received orders that in the event of a threat from approaching US troops he was to burn down the entire camp, including the women imprisoned inside, but Polish soldiers prevented this from happening. The survivors included mostly French nationals, but also Polish, Russian and Hungarian. 

– In Poland we will be exploring the area of the Lower Silesian Wilderness in western Poland, while also assisting each other. The Czechs are more experienced in archaeological research of camp infrastructure, while we have more experience in finding and identifying the graves of prisoners who had died or were murdered. Part of the camp landscape was death, and all that remains is matter. But we can learn a lot from it – says the scientist.

In search of camps that are not on the maps

The first step that scientists take to find the location of a camp is to look at witness accounts recorded, for example, in files of investigations that were carried out after the Second World War, or in memoirs or books. Then the scientists start their field work. Traces of barracks are actually not that difficult to find – there were several standard barrack designs for camps that were intentionally built, and it is relatively easy to identify them by their foundations. It is significantly more difficult to find forgotten or secret graves of Nazi victims – which is the second objective of the Polish-Czech project on landscapes of National Socialist repression.

– Usually, after consulting historical sources, we talk to residents of nearby villages and towns, hoping that someone might recall or have heard something. We then do remote sensing data analysis, geophysical surveys, and conduct surface work such as micro-relief observations, in other words we look for irregularities on the surface, sinkholes that could indicate the presence of a burial. In addition we analyse natural evidence – greenery grows differently in such places – explains Dr. Konczewski, stressing that the work will be carried out mainly using non-destructive methods for material heritage. – We don't intend to dig up graves or exhume the people buried in them, but only to indicate their potential presence in the camp landscapes. We have to accept self-imposed research limitations, given the nature of these graves – the pursuit for strictly scientific knowledge must not cause additional trauma from the tragedies of 20th century totalitarianism – adds the scientist. The results of the research on sites of repression will be synthesised and interpreted in comparison with research on further contaminated landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe. This will enable elements of the neglected materiality of the totalitarian heritage of the 20th century to be discovered and presented.

– We are interested in the whole camp landscape. We want to know, for example, what the greenery around the camp looked like. After all, the site had been landscaped. Camp greenery is an element of the past that is often overlooked in narratives about what happened during the Second World War, and yet we have testimonies in the form of trees that, for example, were planted by prisoners, or even sometimes you can find engravings on the bark. In Pomerania Dr. Dawid Kobiałka has discovered testimonies of survival engraved on beech trees by Italian and Russian prisoners who had been taken there by the Germans to build field fortifications in 1944 – says the scientist.

Excavations are a mine of information for students

Research at the various excavations is also assisted by students who go there as part of their internship or a science club. – We try to introduce young people to scientific work as early as possible. Those who wish to do so can participate in educational and science promoting activities, but also contribute to our research, for example by helping with the excavations. It’s not just about using human biology students as cheap labour during excavations – laughs Dr. Pawel Konczewski – but about them studying the findings which they can use in undergraduate and graduate theses, as well as present them at conferences and in scientific publications – he adds.

Weronika Sądzińska is one of the members of the JUVENIS Anthropology Student Science Club. Together with a team of scientists from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Environmental and Life Science, she participated in the fieldwork in the abandoned Czech village of Libkovice, a village that had functioned continuously for almost 800 years. It was only at the end of the 20th century, following plans to expand a nearby lignite mine, that the locals were displaced and the village razed to the ground. The research, which has been carried out in the area for several years now, aims to identify what the settlement there looked like over the centuries. 

– Participating in the excavation made an enormous impression on me, and my first discovery was super satisfying – says the student, openly admitting that she chose to major in human biology because of her interest in TV crime shows. She wanted to work in a crime laboratory. – I fell in love with physical anthropology at the university and today I'm even thinking about going into academia after graduating and, if all goes well, pursuing a PhD – she adds, explaining that participating in the excavation was a chance to gain experience working with bone material both in the field and in the lab. The dead were buried in Libkovice from the 13th to the mid-19th century.

Involving young people in excavation work helps to nurture the memory of past events – those more troubling and those less so. For example, they can help uncover the mysteries of past life or find physical testimonies to corroborate the words of survivors after the war, thus upholding the truth about the totalitarian rule of the 20th century.

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