Bocien & area

Today was the most cathartic and intense so far ... our guide Jan picked us up first thing this morning; he brought a local army major who has been researching WWII fortifications in his spare time for several years. A few years ago he became interested in the construction of the anti-Soviet tank trenches around Torun - where they were, who built them - and discovered that they were largely dug by Jewish women in forced labour camps. From there he started researching these camps, and has uncovered many of them in the local area.

It seems that by the end of the war the Nazis were sending so many Jews to the camps that they became overcrowded, even for Nazi standards; they increased the executions at the main camps we all know about, they sent prisoners to smaller camps such as Stutthof (for the first few years of the war a POW camp), and when those filled up, to smaller sub-camps. Stutthof had 39 such camps; Bocien (Botten, Bottschin) was one. Bocien, in turn, became overcrowded, and prisoners were sent to makeshift camps - no barracks, no amenities of any kind. In a deep forest we saw the remains of sunken dwellings dug by prisoners for shelter from the elements; the Nazis supplied some rough plywood for them to make walls, and canvas for roofing. The prisoners dug holes with raised berms around the perimeter, and built their makeshift shelters. They used branches from the surrounding forest for bedding. The camps were well hidden from the surroundings, and each dwelling slept about 40 people (by the size, I'd say they would fit no more than 10 by any normal standard). Today most of the bermed holes have been levelled, and only 3 survive in this area. Locals have no idea of the history of these depressions in the ground.

We saw a few places where there are remnants of trenches, all dug by Jewish women to exact Nazi specifications (depth, width of base, slope of sides). The trenches originally zigzagged through the landscape, though only a few scattered bits of the original trenches remain.

He told us that often, trenches were dug not as anti-tank structures, but as graves for the women who dug them. The Polish countryside is saturated with such graves, some marked, some not. Some have been exhumed, but not many. We may never know the final resting place of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent souls.

We saw beautiful farmers' fields that were once used as labour camps. Most traces of their existence is now gone, and more is disappearing as time goes on. We saw the roads the women had to march each day to get to the trenches - in some cases, 5 or 6 km each way, after little sleep, long, hard physical labour, and meagre amounts of food and hydration. One such path included an L-turn; in the middle of the "L" lies a lake. On cold, icy days, the guards would tell women who were too tired to make the long walk home that they could take a shortcut diagonally across the lake, not telling them that the ice was thin. Many broke through the ice and died there.

We saw where a Bocien sub-camp, Grodno, had been located, including the commander's house (still intact), the large brick barn that housed the animals, and the open field where there are no signs of the prisoners who were once there. The camp was visible from a large building used as a factory during the war, and employing POWs, and was close to a lake.

Close to this camp, on a penninsula on the lake, is a monument to the women in a mass grave in two trenches on the site. The major/historian told us that shortly after the war, one of the former POWs testified that he had seen soldiers regularly carting corpses to throw into the mass graves. One day he saw that there were four women at the top of a cart who were still alive and tried to escape. The soldiers took them to the lakeshore and bludgeoned them to death.

We visited the cemetery in Dzwierzno, which today is a Catholic cemetery. Before the war it was a farmer's field; two large trenches were dug there in an L-shape which also became mass graves - there are between 1,000 and 2,000 lying there by the major's estimate. After the war, the area inside the "L" became a Catholic cemetery; there are no gravestones showing deaths before 1945. Apparently locals have been leaving flowers for the Jewish women who died there since the end of the war, and several years ago the town erected a monument in their memory. There are always fresh flowers, which townspeople place there of their own initiative - there is no specific group or person responsible for this, but there are always flowers. I was really moved by this; the women lying there may not have individual graves, but at least they are remembered and their communal grave is respected.

We met the parish priest of the cemetery; he's been there 3 years, after the monument was erected; he seemed very moved by our visit (dad asked who's responsible for the flowers at the monument; when he told us that they were a spontaneous gesture from the town, I lost it, and my sudden weeping made him cry as well) ...

The major showed us so many places where Jewish women were used for slave labour, where they were executed by gunshot, by injection, by beatings, where they are buried, where he knows large mass graves exist but all traces are covered by farmers' fields ... it's difficult to record them all.

I'm left with a deep sense of grief not just for my own ancestors, not even just for the countless Jewish women who perished with them, or for the other 6 million, but also for this land that had such horrible crimes committed on it, and carries such a painful history ... it hurts that some people don't want to know what happened under their own feet, that the family living in a former commander's house has no interest in knowing about it, that artifacts that connect us to that history are being levelled, erased, washed away. But I suppose I can also understand how difficult and painful it would be to live with that horrible story constantly.

Still, as an heir to such recent memory, I can't help but think that it's being wiped away too quickly in some cases, before the full extent of the crimes and suffering have been uncovered.