A Building on an Empty Lot
Israeli historical fragmets
A chapter from book
Mielec
A Forgotten Concentration Camp and Tattoo
Mielec was an industrial city in the Kraków district of southern Poland.
The Germans who conquered the area found existing factories of the Polish aviation industry in the city and converted them for their needs. Two of the largest and most important factories – one for repairing planes, and the other for manufacturing parts – were transferred to the ownership of "Heinkel," a German aircraft production company. Production lines were replaced, and the workers who had previously worked for the Polish government continued to work for wages on new production lines, for the occupying German army.
As the scope of production increased, a camp for forced laborers was established there. The Germans built barracks for workers' accommodation and buildings for staff, fenced the area with electric fences, and scattered manned watchtowers. Workers of various nationalities from German-occupied territories and Jews from the nearby Mielec ghetto were brought forcibly to the camp. They were joined by Jews from other ghettos and camps who had undergone selections and were deemed suitable for the required activities.
At the beginning of its operation, the complex was defined as a "labor camp," where conditions were slightly more lenient than in a concentration camp: Food was distributed in reasonable portions, prisoners in the camp could receive packages and letters from relatives, forced laborers worked alongside Polish workers who occasionally smuggled them food supplies and mail, and the general treatment was considered less harsh.
As the war pressure intensified and the number of prisoners grew, conditions worsened more and more.
Muniek arrived at the Mielec labor camp on a train with hundreds of prisoners – a "fresh shipment" from the Budzyń camp. They did not understand the difference between a "labor camp" and a "concentration camp." For them, the transfer changed nothing – the same enclosed compound, the same strict rules, and the same daily routine entirely dedicated to work and sleep.
Upon arrival, they underwent an organized reception process of registration and receiving an identification number that would accompany them and serve as a substitute for their names. The civilian clothes they had worn in Budzyń were taken, and in their place, they received a single set of clothing – striped prisoner uniforms in blue and white with a matching round fabric hat, and wooden shoes. On his shirt, two pieces of cloth were attached – one with a Star of David symbol, and on the other, his personal number was stamped.
Muniek, prisoner number 15078, underwent delousing, his head was shaved, and he was sent to a living barrack for children and adolescents under 18. The barrack was only a place to sleep at night. The very next day, he was sent to the Heinkel aircraft parts manufacturing plant and entered a new work routine.
Every morning, he left with a group of prisoners for a day's work that began with a group walk.
They marched in an organized manner, about a half-hour walk, from the camp gates to the factory gates. Accompanied by armed guards, they walked on paved roads and dirt paths between forests and houses, and sang together all the way. "Zingen" (to sing) – their escorts, responsible for their transport, commanded them, and they sang marching songs in rhythm with their walk. One would start singing, and everyone would join him. The loud singing ensured their alertness and their staying within formation, without thinking of dangerous ideas like trying to slip out of line and escape.
Upon reaching the factory, Muniek turned to his place – a corner in the production hall where parts of an aircraft fuselage produced by Heinkel were laid out. He was part of a team engaged in connecting and soldering sheet metal parts to the aircraft body. The teamwork was done by hand, without gloves.
The workers used air hammers and small and large tools, ensuring that the parts were assembled with extreme precision. Any deviation in assembly, any mistake, was costly to the one who deviated or erred. A few sometimes got a second chance, but another mistake by a worker led to his removal from work, return to the camp, and marking him as useless, his life no longer valuable. Every civilian who worked there and every supervisor, German or Polish, sealed fates of life and death – a Jude who annoyed one of them, by his smile or tone of voice, lived on borrowed time. A work shift was conducted in a tense atmosphere and with uncompromising discipline, accompanied by shouts and physical punishments. Supervisors exploited the workers for various auxiliary tasks – cleaning the factory, transporting loads and parts from the warehouse to the production hall. Once, Muniek was required to carry cement bags with his friends, weighing almost as much as his own body weight. His superiors did not care that these were workers whose bodies were thinning and who suffered from malnutrition.
A few months after Muniek's arrival in Mielec, the Germans decided to change the status of the entire complex. Instead of a labor camp, the place became a concentration camp (in German "Konzentrationslager") – a technical and bureaucratic matter that was also related to a change in its administrative affiliation.
The new status did not significantly affect the daily routine but left its mark on the forced laborers. They were forced to undergo a tattooing procedure on their arm, so they would be marked as belonging to a concentration camp.
One by one, the prisoners arrived at the infirmary barrack and placed their right forearms on the tattoo artist's table. He held a needle dipped in unsterilized blue ink and punctured the forearm before him. The needle pricked the flesh with sharp, rapid punctures, puncture after puncture, with maximum density that created a tattoo consisting of two letters: KL – the abbreviation for Konzentrationslager.
These two letters have accompanied Moshe Jakubowicz his entire life. They were seared onto Muniek the boy’s right forearm and were never erased.
KL tattoo on Moshe Jakubowicz's arm
The KL tattoo is one of the rarer ones made during World War II in concentration camps. A relatively small number of prisoners in Mielec and several other camps were forced to have it tattooed on their arm. This rare tattoo did not gain the publicity and Verbreitung (spread/distribution) of other marking tattoos worn by Jews in concentration camps.
And like the tattoo, so too is the story of Mielec.
The camp and all that transpired within it have been pushed to the margins of historical research. Among the multitude of testimonies and documents collected over the years on the Holocaust period and World War II, there are few mentions of the labor camp that became a concentration camp. Forced laborers who were there and gave their written and oral testimonies downplayed the descriptions of life there, mentioning Mielec as a transit station on their way from one confinement to another, from one work to another, from one camp to another.
Seven decades after its existence, there is almost no one left to tell about Mielec, the concentration camp that left its mark on the arms of thousands of Jews – a camp that was not particularly large, and employed "only" a few thousand prisoners, some of whom moved on and some were murdered or died and were burned. A quantity too small to cross the narrative threshold that would grant it widespread distribution among the pages of the short Nazi Empire's history. The main activity in the camp took place during the final stages of World War II.
The German war machine began to creak, and many tools were needed to drive it towards the expected decisive moments.
Four arms with the KL tattoo of Mielec camp survivors Photo courtesy of Mr. Ronen Katz
The World War entered its decisive stages.
In the entirely burning European continent, massive military forces of great powers stood facing each other: Germany and its allies against Russia, England, and the United States and their allies. Modern weapons, for those days, spread fire and plumes of smoke – planes emerged in the air for bombings, tanks and cannons thundered on land, and infantry divisions crossed borders that had been erased from the map and became war zones.
In the fifth year of the war, Germany lost its allied countries. Other countries on the continent were liberated by the armies of Russia and the Allied powers. The noose tightened around the German army's areas of control, and its forces retreated further and further from occupied territories.
Occupied Poland had not yet been liberated.
The Germans invaded Poland at the beginning of the war, and since then, they had deepened their grip. They established a repressive regime, settled "racially pure" German citizens, looted its economic treasures, and utilized its resources. Throughout western Poland, in the areas under their control, concentration and extermination camps and labor camps, factories, and weapons industries were scattered, helping the collapsing empire hold out with its last forces. The Nazi control mechanism continued to move trains from camp to camp, city to city, factory to factory, from ghettos to extermination camps. People, goods, and means of production moved from point to point, sometimes based on bureaucratic decisions and sometimes after cost/benefit analysis and security considerations.
In the summer months of 1944, echoes of bombings were heard throughout the Mielec camp. The Russian army was approaching the Lublin district and put the aviation industry factories in real danger.
The camp organized for a hasty movement. Muniek and hundreds of other prisoners were put on a train on their way to Wieliczka, the next level of hell.
This is a chapter from the book "A Building on an Empty Lot" - the story of Moshe Jakubowicz's life (Written in Hebrew).
Selected Translated chapters from the book appear here and can be accessed via the following links:
