The Site of National Remembrance

It was one of the many camps which the Polish administration organized in Silesia after World War 2, designed for the German population who were waiting – according to the decision of the victorious powers taken in Potsdam – to be resettled into the heart of Germany. The camp was located in the area of the so-called Camp I (Lager I), in its northernmost part which was developed the latest, since in the end of the 1930s. POWs had not been accommodated there during World War 2.

The camp was supposed to perform a few functions primarily related to: displacement, labor, isolation and penalty. It was supervised by the County Office of Public Security in Niemodlin. It functioned from July 1945 till October 1946, during that time accommodating about 5-6 thousand people in total. The most numerous group were civilians of German origin or acknowledged to be so, who were rapidly being displaced from the neighboring places and expecting to be transferred into the heart of Germany. There were members of Nazi organizations and guards of the former German POW camps detained here, as well. Among the people who were kept here were also Silesians representing the Polish national affiliation. The detained were under obligation to work: women and men worked in nearby estates and on farms, in offices and industrial plants. Hard living conditions, hunger, diseases (the epidemic of typhus) as well as harsh treatment on the part of the Polish camp authorities resulted in high mortality among them. It is estimated that about 1.5 thousand died. The dead were buried in anonymous graves, individually or collectively, at the back of the camp or outside it. The most tragic stage of the existence of this place was the period between July and the beginning of October 1945, when the camp commander, Czesław Gęborski, and some other camp functionaries perpetrated a lot of crimes and abuses with reference to the detained.

The victims of the Labor Camp in Łambinowice, for political reasons, had to await their commemoration for a long time. This had not been possible by 1989. In 1991, at the end of the road leading into the camp there was set up a wooden Latin cross and four years later – a granite monument in the form of a Silesian penitentiary cross executed according to the design of Eugeniusz Get Stankiewicz. At a short distance behind the obelisk, there was established a cemetery in the years 2000-2002.