VE Day 8 May 2025

A visit to the former Reichenbach-Sportschule concentration camp

As the 8th of May 2025 was approaching, an idea started forming in my head. I wanted to be at the very place where my father, Josef Lewkowicz, had been liberated 80 years earlier. It was the beginning of a new life for him after more than two years incarcerated in six concentration camps, he had just turned 17.

With a photo of my father, aged 17/18, outside the former site of the Reichenbach-Sportschule camp

Although we had travelled to Poland together before and he had shown me where he grew up and where he lived (and was hidden) in the ghetto of Chrzanow, and we had visited the Memorial and Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, he had not shown me the places where he worked as a slave labourer, together with his father Moses and brother Perec, from spring of 1943, when he was captured and sent to the Sosnowice transit camp, until the 8th of May 1945. When we talked about his experiences during the war in daily conversations, these places remained abstract, he mentioned that he worked for German industries and that the camps he stayed in were smaller labour camps. The details and locations of these camps remained vague for me.

So I was rather surprised when I realised in preparation for the trip to find the remnants of these camps, that they all were in relatively close vicinity to Wroclaw, then the German city of Breslau. Reading and learning more about these labour camps, I realised there was a reason for this. The camps were all part of ‘Organisation Schmeldt’, which brought mostly Jewish prisoners to work as slave labourers to the vicinity of German industries. My father was incarcerated first in Markstadt, (today Jelcz-Laskowice), and was sent every day to work in the huge Kraftborn electricity plant (today Siechnice). In his last camp, called Reichenbach-Sportschule, he worked as a slave labourer at Siemens in the town of Reichenbach. That camp was a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen and that was where he was liberated. I wanted to be as close to the location of that camp as possible, to mark the 80th anniversary of his liberation in 1945.

While I managed to ascertain that the town of Reichenbach is now called Dzierzionow, I could not find out much more online about the Reichenbach Sportschule camp. There was only one site which mentioned the camp and had some information, and some photographs listed. It was a blog site by Janek  Pawul, who grew up on Dzierzionow and who became a well-known DJ in Poland. I knew that it would be very difficult to find any traces of the camp by myself, so I wrote an e-mail to the e-mail address given on Janek’s blog site, saying that I was planning a visit and asking if it was possible to meet. I was positively surprised when I had a reply from Janek a few hours later, saying that he would be delighted to meet us and that he was happy to travel to Dzierzioniow from Katowice, where he lives today. He did not know at that point that my father came from Katowice and that that was the city he returned to after being liberated. We arranged to meet in the centre of Dzierzionow in a few weeks’ time.

On the 8th of May in the morning, we set out from Wroclaw to the arranged meeting place in Dzierzionow and met Janek, who was already waiting for us. I was grateful that he was willing to share his knowledge and show us the location of the camp. We followed his car and a few kilometres outside the town, we turned into a small road which took us to an abandoned piece of land, secured by two fences. We could see the old barracks and something which looked like a watch towner. I did not expect this, I did not expect the barracks to be still there today. I did not expect to find the fence which my father described in his interview for the USC Shoah Foundation in 1996. It made his experiences of 80 years ago so very tangible. It felt important to place his memories here and to read an excerpt from his memories here, his voice mediated by my voice and translation.  

He describes his arrival as follows:

‘We were in the fortunate position that they still needed us for work, we were still needed for the German final victory. Of 1,300 people, 500 were sent to Auschwitz. The rest, which included myself, my brother, and father, were sent to the Reichenbach-Sportschule concentration camp. The SS was already waiting for us there. We had to strip naked and then they took us to a delousing facility. After the delousing, they put us in barracks that had been built there. They were not wooden barracks. Everyone was assigned to a different Block.  among ourselves. I was in the fifth Block, my father was in the seventh Block, and I think my brother was in the ninth Block. We had the same work as in the previous camp, because it was all in same vicinity. My brother worked in the brickworks, and I continued to work at Siemens in Reichenbach, doing construction work. My father continued to work in the camp as a potato peeler’.

My father’s recollections make me understand how these barracks have survived until today, as there were not made from wood and the whole complex was used as a pig farm after the war. During our visit we met a woman who grew up here and her parents had worked as pig farmers on this site. She thought that at least one of the barracks could be converted into a museum to tell the story of the camp. Although there is a small memorial in the nearby forest for the people who died in the Reichenbach-Sportschule camp, there is no sign or explanation on or near the site. In total, my father stayed for about nine months at the Reichenbach - Sportschule camp. He told the story of liberation in his interview but he also talked about it many other times. It is a story of hope for a better life, which started when the SS commandant called all the prisoners to come to the assembly point.    

Here is the story in my father’s words:

‘SS camp commandant Ulrich called all the prisoners on the 7th of May, all 860, to the assembly square and said to us: “We are leaving tomorrow and you will be free men. We are leaving.” And he asked the Jewish elder to tear off his epaulettes, as a symbolic gesture. The next day, the SS were gone. And we stayed in the camp. The camp was outside the city and we did not know what to do. The Germans had left but the Russians had not arrived. Everyone was afraid to go out. It was decided that a boy should go out first and the choice fell on me. I was lifted across the barbed wire and made it to the main road, where I saw a Soviet army column coming my way. I looked them and they looked at me, I was still the striped uniform from the camp. I found one officer who understood some Yiddish and told him about our camp. He them diverted the whole column to the location of the camp and that's how we were liberated. I can remember something else. When we were liberated, the Soviet officer in charge, said to us: “Can you bring me a table? We thought he was going to distribute food or something. He climbed onto the table in the middle of the assembly square and said: “Can you see the sun? We all looked up at the sun. The he continued: “Today the sun has come to you.” And that was it.'

My father describes that he, his brother, and father shortly after the liberation went into the town of Reichenbach and settled in an empty house, which had belonged to a German family who fled Reichenbach, where they recuperated. When I asked him in the interview what liberation felt like, he replied:

‘It is hard to describe that feeling. Of course, it was a feeling of happiness. You got out and you are free. You do not need to think about death every minute of the day’. 

Standing on the edge of the barracks on a spring day in 2025, I feel very grateful that my father, his brother and father survived the terrible conditions in the five camps they were sent to and managed to stay alive until they were liberated by the Soviet army here in this very place, 80 years ago, and were able to start the journey of re-building their lives in May 1945, sadly without Josef’s mother Regina who was murdered in Auschwitz.

Thank you to Janek Pawul for having created a blog with photos and information on the little-known history of the Reichenbach-Sportschule camp and for taking the time to show us around and share his knowledge.  

Dr Bea Lewkowicz and Janek Pawul, 8 May 2025