Birnbäumel

Member of the Boys were taken as slave labours to the Birnbäumel labour camp complex, a subcamp of the Gross Rosen concentration camp.

The Gross Rosen concentration camp was operated by Nazi Germany.  The camp had 100 subcamps located in what is now the Czechia, Germany and Poland. 

The Boys were child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.

The Birnbäumel labour camp was located in the village of Gruszeczka, Birnbäumel in German, 40km north of Wrocław in Poland. Before 1945, the area was part of Germany.

It was one of many camps in the region and one of four operating in the Gross Rosen concentration camp system created in the ‘Barthold Operation’, which was construction of fortifications for the defence of Lower Silesia Province against the oncoming Soviet offensive.

The women were brought to the camp from Auschwitz II-Birkenau. They worked building trenches.

“It was a little town and we were outside the town, We were given clean clothes there and given good food but we were marched out every morning to work. The work we did was digging ditches. We walked through this little town and we never ever saw a soul and all the windows and shutters were shut. It seems as though they knew when we would be walking through and nobody should look at us and we shouldn’t look at them. I am not sure which. Well, then we were marched to these fields and we had to dig ditches.

And life was very cheap as if you didn’t dig hard you were shot. They just shot you in the ditch.”

Rachel Levy testament given to the Imperial War Museum in 2006. Levy was 15 years old when she was in the camp.

Dissolution

The camp was probably evacuated on 23 January 1945. The prisoners were led on foot to the Gross-Rosen main camp and were then transported to Bergen-Belsen in freight cars. A group of about 20 prisoners escaped from the evacuation column as the march began and were liberated in Birnbäumel.