It was hell here…

The Polish concentration camp in Bereza-Kartuzskaya as a reflection of the monstrous European trend

...Here is a fence fragment  in Bereza-Kartuzskaya:  thick thorns between pillars, Firmly twisted, tangled  tenaciously to make evil, rusty knots, All in sharp spikes; stretched tight, blocking the way  to the future for us…

These heart-piercing lines, written by prisoner No. 820 of the Bereza-Kartuzskaya concentration camp, whose name has remained unidentified, were published in the book Song from Bereza by the brave patriot, Aleksandr Gavrilyuk, who also went through that hell. It is generally believed that concentration camps created by the German Nazis and their allies became one of the darkest pages in the history of the twentieth century. Yet, many European countries had contributed to the formation of the horrendous trend long before the Third Reich. Belarus’ western neighbours were no exception. As noted by the famous historian, Igor Marzalyuk, 109 Byelorussian patriots were shot in Poland as early as in 1923, and 3,000 people had languished in the dungeons of Western Byelorussia by 1927. The prisons and concentration camp in Bereza-Kartuzskaya were overcrowded, and according to the incomplete data, 10,000 Byelorussians, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians passed through the latter.

Prisoners' shackles at the Bereza-Kartuzskaya concentration camp        Pavel Bogush

A long and bloody story

The first real concentration camps, created and used systematically, were built by Spaniards in Cuba back in 1896-1897 during the fight against the national liberation movement on the island. According to the most conservative estimates, the number of deaths amounted to about 225,000 people in 18 months. Photos of those years are sometimes difficult to distinguish from those taken at Hitler’s death factories — skeletal people who can barely stand on their feet, with mountains of bones above human height around... 
However, the Cuban tragedy got somewhat blurred in the public consciousness against the background of Madrid’s defeat in the Spanish-American war and is, therefore, not so well known to the audience today as two other below examples of the inhuman violence exercised by enlightened white colonialists. This refers to the British concentration camps for Boers during the war in South Africa, and the death zones created by the Germans during the suppression of the uprising of the Herero and Nama indigenous ethnic groups on the territory of modern Namibia.  
In the first case, subjects of the British Crown, who fought for gold and diamond mines in South Africa, staged nothing short of a genocide of both the white and black population of the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State. Before descending to such atrocities, the British army suffered a number of humiliating defeats from the Boers at the front. London deployed to Africa a huge army of 450,000 soldiers headed by Field Marshal Frederick Roberts that managed to occupy most of the territory of both African states, but could not cope with the constantly expanding guerrilla movement. As a result, the British found nothing better than to use the scorched-earth tactics and drive about 200,000 Boers into concentration camps — mostly women and children since men fought in the ranks of partisan formations. The diabolical strategy bore fruit, and after the death of at least 26,000 prisoners, the Boer leadership surrendered.

The trend towards the creation of concentration camps for the disobedient in the first half of the last century was largely due to the success of the British in South Africa and the lack of an unequivocal response and condemnation from the world powers.

The Germans arranged an even more hideous massacre during the campaign in Namibia in 1902-1908. German General Lothar von Trotha’s colonial forces slaughtered more than 75,000 people — that is, three quarters of the Herero and about half of the Nama tribes — during the punitive operation and in concentration camps. The Germans, like the British, approached the genocide systematically and, perhaps for the first time in history, set the goal for themselves to physically destroy the disobedient and not just affect the people’s leaders, albeit in such a barbaric way.
The Austro-Hungarians, diligent students of the Germans, brought the inhuman practice of exterminating people on an industrial scale to Europe during the First World War. The Terezín and Thalerhof concentration camps became places of torture and sophisticated abuse of tens of thousands of Bukovina and Galician Ruthenians, as well as those who sympathised with the Russian Empire. About three thousand people died in Thalerhof alone in the first year and a half, and about two thousand in Terezín during all the time. 
The genocide arranged by the Austrians marked the end of the unique Rusyn culture and cleared the way for the rapid flourishing of primitive and aggressive Ukrainian nationalism.

Kostek the Hangman and the ‘Stalin’s path’

Interwar Poland became one of the states marked with the indelible stain for the organisation of concentration camps. Józef Piłsudski’s regime had distinct fascist features.
The necessary practical skills were acquired during the Soviet-Polish war [February 1919 – March 1921], when an enormous number of captured Red Army soldiers, up to 80,000 out of 165,000, were tortured in camps on the territory of Poland. The Polish authorities became even firmer in their convictions after the liquidation of the Byelorussian peasant-labour community, the arrest of a large group of ex-deputies of the Sejm [the highest governing body of the Third Polish Republic] who opposed Piłsudski in 1930 and, finally, a large-scale operation to pacify Western Ukraine.
On June 15th, 1934, Ukrainian nationalist Hryhorij Maciejko shot dead Polish Minister of the Interior Bronisław Pieracki, and just two days later a concentration camp was established in Bereza-Kartuzskaya. It was created by the highest ranks of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the infamous Polesye voivode, Wacław Kostek-Biernacki, became the project supervisor. Even by the undemanding European standards of the first half of the twentieth century, this character earned the reputation of a complete executioner — the nickname Kostek the Hangman was not given by chance to the former Colonel of the Polish Army from the First Brigade of the Polish Legions as part of Austria-Hungary. It is generally believed among historians that the concentration camp was set up specifically in Bereza-Kartuzskaya not least due to the personality of the governor.   
Freedom fighters from Poland, Western Ukraine and Byelorussia made the main contingent of that terrible institution. Interestingly, according to the camp documentation, 43 percent of the prisoners were recorded as Poles, 33 percent as Jews, 17 as Ukrainians and only 6 percent as Byelorussians. However, in reality, it is our compatriots who made the largest group, since either Catholics were registered as Poles or people identified themselves as part of the titular nation, in hope for better treatment.
The Bereza-Kartuzskaya concentration camp applied the same methods that the Nazis had already begun to use in their extermination camps, or those that the Nazis would introduce a little later. Thus, the camp was guarded by penal policemen, pathologically cruel people abusing alcohol and resenting their fate. The prisoners’ memoirs also mention special groups of ruthless criminals who, together with recruited Ukrainian nationalists, helped to maintain the most stringent regime. 
The abuse and torture of prisoners was brutal and sophisticated: they were constantly beaten, humiliated, forced to work hard and often engage in meaningless work. Thus, the Poles invented a special torture — the ‘Stalin’s path’ — a section of road paved with sharp stones near the guards’ barracks, along which prisoners were made to crawl staining the path with blood.
The exact number of prisoners and victims is still unclear. Polish sources have reported a little over 3,000 prisoners and only 13 dead. Eyewitness accounts and Soviet research suggest at least 10,000 prisoners.

The concentration camp in Bereza-Kartuzskaya has become a gloomy symbol of the Polish occupation of Western Byelorussia. In a situation where the current authorities in Warsaw dream of returning the Kresy Wschodnie [Eastern Borderlands], the memory of the atrocities of the Polish punishers on Byelorussian land is a guarantee of our sovereignty and of the fact that the Third Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in case of aggression, can end up in the same way as its predecessor. 

By Anton Popov