Archive/File: people/k/krepinska.helena/press/sunday- times.950129 places/poland/zamosc/press/sunday- times.950129 Last-Modified: 1997/03/31 Source: Sunday Times (Perth) [Sunday Liftout], January 29, 1995 (Pg. 1-2) (Reproduced by permission of the author) The woman from Auschwitz-Birkenau * Friday was the 50th. Anniversary of the liberation of the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. _Sunday Times_ reporter Joe Poprzeczny, with his wife, has visited 35 archives in Poland, Germany, England, Israel and the United States, to investigate a wartime population-cleansing action in Poland's Zamosc region which meant villages were settled by Germans. As well as researching nazi motives for the action, he has focused on how it affected one Polish family. [Photographs; "Then Helena's horror in Auschwitz - head shaven, reduced to a number and tattooed to make it permanent] [Photograph; "Life in the village before the Germans came in 1942 - Helena Krepinska, Zofia Weclawik and in the front, grandmother Anna Weclawik and granddaughter Zofia."] They came in the early hours of the morning, screaming "raus", "raus" - the German word for, "get out". Militarised German police units kicked and banged doors of all the cottages in the picturesque Polish village of Skierbieszow (pronounced, Skee-er-bee-eh-shoov). The sleepy residents were told they had 20 minutes to pack a few rudimentary possessions and assemble in the village square. Anyone resisting would be shot. Many were. It was November 28, 1942, and the worst fears of the villagers had come true. For Helena Krepinska, who was a 25-year-old wife and mother, it was to be the beginning of two years of hell, hunger and horror. From Skierbieszow's village square, Helena and her husband, Janek, her 18-month-old daughter, Zofia, and mother Anna Weclawik, were taken to a transit camp in the market town of Zamosc, 17km away. Some of Skierbieszow's residents, as well as those in other nearby villages, were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp which, by late 1942, was a fully- operational killing and labor centre. In the transit camp they were racially examined for any "valuable ethnic features". All failed to impress the SS examiners and the three adults were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the nazis' most notorious concentration camps, on one of three trainloads of Poles dispatched there in December, 1942. Helena was not allowed to take her 18-month-old daughter. Zofia was forcibly taken from her and her daughter's fate was to remain a mystery until after the war. Rumors had been rife for about a year that everyone in the Zamosc region would be expelled to make room for ethnic Germans from Romania and Yugoslavia. Helena was just one of 100,000 Polish villages expelled from her home by the nazis over an eight-month period beginning on the fateful November morning. All up, 300 villages were "cleansed" of their Polish inhabitants in what was one of the biggest such wartime operations. About 1700, including a few hundred children, were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Others were sent to Majdanek, another concentration camp and still others would end up in Germany as forced labor. A small number, mainly the elderly and the very young, were scattered all over Poland. A still smaller number, mainly young men, escaped to nearby forests where they joined growing partisan groups that launched a struggle against the region's incoming ethnic Germans who had taken over their land and property. None of the Poles saw rhyme or reason for their fate. For the nazis, however, it was all part of a grand plan. The Zamosc region is 150km south-east of Warsaw. After the Germans overran Poland in 1939 it was ruled by Odilo Globocnik, the SS police chief and a favorite of the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. As well as being a vehement Austrian anti-Semite, Globocnik had a strange fascination with archaelogy. Throughout 1940 and 1941, when he was building four huge killing centres - Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor and Belzec - to eliminate Polish and European Jews, he secretly directed special SS academic teams to conduct histoical and racial research around Zamosc. By early 1941 they had convinced him that this part of Poland had been settled by ancient Germanic tribes thousands of years earlier. They were also able to point to a subsequent tiny migration of Germans in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Despite the fact that most of the Germans were assimilated into the Polish community by 1941 - like the Germans of South Australia's Barossa Valley - Globocnik and Himmler felt justified claiming Zamosc as German territory. In mid-1941 Himmler, the architect of the Jewish holocaust and Auschwitz, visited Globocnik and the two decided Zamosc would become a major German administrative centre and its nearby villages would be settled by ethnic Germans. [Continued Page 2] [Headline] She survived the holocaust terror [Photograph; "In Perth, a million miles from the nightmare of the past, Helena today with her grandchildren - Mark, Matthew and Amanda."] The details of Himmler's General Plan Ost, or Eastern Plan, were never revealed during the war and only came to light indirectly during one of the lesser-known Nuremberg Trials conducted by the US Army in 1946 and 1947. To this day the plan is still largely ignored by western historians and certainly it was never put into practice on anything like the scale of the Holocaust. Hitler's defeats on the Eastern Front meant it never could be. But there is no doubt that had Hitler won the war, it would have been. The plan called for the progressive expulsion of tens of millions of Slavs, followed by their racial examination to cull "lost German blood" from within their ranks. Those deemed racially inferior would become the nucleus of a vast population of slave labor to be placed at the beck and call of their ethnic German masters. The "cleansing" of the Zamosc region's 300 villages was to be the model for the plan which envisaged the Germanisation of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the Baltic States, to possibly as far as the Ural Mountains. Each of Globocnik's targeted villages was first surrounded in the early hours by armed units of 200 to 300 German police. Shortly after sun-up the units closed in and woke the sleeping villages with cow bells, barking dogs, shouting and other loud noises. Anyone who resisted the round-up or tried to escape was killed on the spot. Outside each village. horsedrawn wagons were assembled to take the captured peasants and their families to a transit camp for racial classification by SS teams working for the vast bureaucratic machine called the Main Race and Resettlement Office. These teams ranked villagers according to whether they possessed various designated physical features. The ideal were those seen as inherently *~Aryan" such as blond hair and blue eyes. If a villager possessed these features they would be "offered" the chance to be "re-Germanised". If not, they were destined for another fate, either Auschwitz, labor in the Reich, or simply expulsion from the region. As soon as the last villager was removed from his home, other SS units moved into the village and, with the help of conscripted labor, made it ready for its new &*owners", families of ethnic Germans brought from camps elsewhere in Poland. Very few of these Germans came from Germany. Most were from Romania and Yugoslavia or other parts of Poland. By late l942, when Helena Krepinska was forcibly removed from her home, Poland was home to nearly a million ethnic Germans who had been transferred by Berlin from parts of eastern and southern Europe. Himmler, in his capacity as Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening Germandom, was responsible for the movement and welfare of these ethnic Germans who had settled beyond the Reich's borders before 1939. These ' lost Germans" were to be consolidated in what the nazis called strong-polnts. The Zamosc region was to be the first such strong-point. Once Poles were removed. ethnic Germans were allocated houses farmlets, agricultural equipment and stock. SS men then moved in with other nazi groups such as teachers and medical personnel to begin reGermanising the new settlers many of whom had forgotten the German language and Gerrnan customs. German schools and community centres were created with the intention of promoting Germanness among the settlers whose mission it was to Germanise the region. The fate of the Poles was to be culled and to work. Once each Polish village community reached a transit camp. they were racially assessed. Because both adult Krepinskis and Helena's mother did not meet the racial criteria for Germanisation they were sent to Auschwitz. One horrific aspect of Zamosc's "cleansing" action was that children were forcibly taken from parents whi]e they were in transit camps and sent separately by train to various parts of occupied Poland. Children with desired racial features were taken off to orphanages to be Germanised. According to the Polish historian. Professor Zygmunt Mankowski: "In particularly cruel conditions Polish children were caught and about 7000 kidnapped." Some of the trains were accidently opened by suspicious Poles and the dead and dying children, often In the care of elderly Polish women, were found. Many such child-laden trains reached Warsaw and surrounding towns, and carriages were opened by railway workers and passers-by. Such incidents often resulted in the discovery of childen who had frozen to death. But in some cases children were rescued. This was the case with 18-month-old Zofia Krepinska, who was taken with a group of other children from a train to a school south of Warsaw and from there adopted by a widow, Mrs Stanislawa Kowalska. Helena reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on December 13, 1942, and spent two months in the women's section. which is just south of the famous railway entrance so often reproduced after the war, before being moved to a sub-camp. one of about 40 linked to Auschwitz, called Babice, 6km north of the killing centre. Babice was a cleared village inside a barbed-wired compound where about 500 women were held. It was home for Helena until September 1944 when Auschwitz- Birkenau was starting to be cleared of internees because of the advancing Red Army. During that time she worked around the mam Auschwitz camp. Teams of women were employed as field workers cultivating potatoes and beetroot. Others dug drains to help overcome the boggy conditions around the camp. Before Helena was moved to Babice she saw her husband one last time through the barbed wire. She vividly recalls how red-faced he was, which indicated to her that he was extremely ill. About this time another inmate told her that her mother had died. Her overriding memory of Babice was the constant hunger, cold and tight supervision by uniformed German female caretakers. The daily ration was black bread, a rye soup, and an imitation tea. Work in the fields was supervised by Ukrainian guards under German direction. During the first two months she was inside Auschwitz- Birkenau, the main killing centre. she saw Jews directed to the camp's infamous crematoriums but her dominant memory of the holocaust was the smell of burnt bodies from the camp's chimneys. Two winters and two summers later -- in September 1944 -- when the Red Arrny was still four months away from liberating the camp, she and her fellow prisoners in Babice sub-camp were taken to the main Auschwitz camp to be showered. But instead of facing the same fate as 1.5 million others, she and the Babice women were put on a train and railed across the Reich to France where they were placed under the jurisdiction of a subcamp of the horrific Natzweiler concentration camp called Ebingen. Germany desperately needed munitions workers and Helena and the other Babice women were "drafted" to boost production. But the plant, on the outskirts of Thionville in German- controlled French Lorraine, was near the western front by late 1944. Helena and her fellow prisoners worked for only a day or so before the Germans evacuated them because of the advancing Allies. They were marched off on foot and, at one point at dusk, their column was strafed by Allied aircraft. Helena and several others managed to run into a nearby wood where, in the confusion, they were left by the German units guarding them. The group she was with hid out in the disused French Maginot Line for several weeks, eating raw potatoes Iying in the fields and getting some help from a Ukrainian farm laborer. Later she and the others moved into the nearby village of Kemplich where each became a housekeeper or farm laborer. General George Patton's famous Third Army was rapidly moving eastwards towards the Rhine, so at the end of the war Helena found herself on the western side of what was soon to be called the Iron Curtain . Soon after the war she wrote to the priest at Skierbieszow to contact her sister, also called Zofia, who had evaded capture on the night of November 27-28, 1942, because she was away from her home in the village. Unknown to Helena, her sister had accidently met a woman in early 1943 whose mother had acted as baby Zofia's guardian on the train and who had handed her over to Mrs Kowalska. Helena had been quick-witted enough in the transit camp before Zofia was taken from her to attach a note on cardboard and string around her daughter's neck that bore the child's name. Several months' later, the elderly woman met her own daughter and said she had cared for Krepinska's child and left the baby in the care of Mrs Kowalska. Helena's sister travelled to this town and maintained contact with her niece and Mrs Kowalska for the rest of the war. Soon after the war Helena remarried. Her second husband was a Polish forced laborer who had spent two years in Kemplich. After Patton's army repelled the Germans, the couple, with hundreds of thousands of other refugees, were taken to a United Nations refugee camp in Western Germany where they stayed until migrating to WA in March 1950. Because the Cold War had split Europe, Zofia could not join her mother in Germany. But the two maintained contact by mail and parcels regularly left Australia for Poland with items that were considered basic in the west but luxuries in socialist Poland. When Solidarity emerged, Zofia, her husband, and daughter, decided Poland was not an ideal place to live and Helena and her family sponsored them to migrate to Perth. Zofia was finallv re-united with her mother, almost 40 years after being snatched from her as a baby. Why do I know all this? Because Helena Krepinska, now Helena Poprzeczny, is my mother
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