Full Circle: A Homecoming to Free Poland by Sikorski Radek

Author:Sikorski, Radek [Sikorski, Radek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

POTULICE

WHAT MUST IT FEEL LIKE to live near Dachau or Auschwitz today, to farm the fields fertilized with human ash? Foreign tourists and journalists who come to Poland are invariably shocked by sights like Hotel Oświęcim, Auschwitz Hotel. The town had existed for centuries, and the hotel was there before the camp, but in the world’s imagination Auschwitz means only one thing: extermination. To use the name for anything else seems like sacrilege.

I have a good idea of what it is like to live next to a concentration camp because, as I realized in the course of delving into Chobielin’s history, we actually live next to one. You can see its chimney spewing black smoke, not two kilometers away from Chobielin: Potulice, the prison where Uncle Edek wrote his diary, used to be a concentration camp. As you enter the village, you drive past a huge oak tree, a housing estate, a soccer field, and a furniture factory with a gas station. On the other side of the road is a large compound dominated by watchtowers, walls with barbed wire, a large steel gate, and chimneys spitting black smoke. The road’s asphalt covers cobblestones originally laid by the inmates. To most people around Potulice, as it would be to most people everywhere, this is all just a part of the landscape.

Until the 1930s, Potulice was an estate belonging to the Potulicki family, one of the wealthiest in Poland. It had a large neo-Gothic palace, a nineteenth-century church, and a deer park. It was surrounded by thousands of acres of land, carp ponds, and extensive manufactures. When the old Countess Potulicka, the last of her family, died in 1932, she bequeathed it to the Catholic University in Lublin. The palace became the seat of a theological seminary, training priests to minister to Poles abroad.

But when the Nazis arrived, they began to use the palace and its grounds as a transit camp: Poles were being expelled from the region to be replaced by Germans from Bessarabia and Romania. Its first prisoners were those few priests who stayed behind to protect the library after the seminary was evacuated. Prisoners began arriving in February 1941—over two thousand people from Bydgoszcz and the surrounding countryside in the first few days. The place was totally unprepared to handle such numbers. They slept in the palace rooms and in corridors subdivided into levels with rough boards. Like animals, they had hay for bedding. There was no heating, closets, or washing facilities.

Only later in the year did a proper camp come into existence, designed to hold ten thousand inmates, mainly Poles. Prisoners from the infamous camp at Stutthof near Gdańsk built thirty barracks as well as accommodation for sixty-five SS men and two hundred guards. The construction was personally supervised by Albert Forster, the gauleiter. Photographs show him during an inspection: a thin, handsome man in breeches with a swastika band on his left arm and a pistol in his belt. Fierce memos flew between the camp and his office.

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