The Janowska camp in Lvov was both a forced labour camp and a killing site for the Jews of eastern Galicia. It operated from October 1941 to November 1943. Around 200,000 people, almost all Jews, were murdered there. The camp was the site of one of the most desperate prisoner uprisings of the Holocaust: on 19 November 1943, as the camp was being liquidated, the prisoners attacked their guards and around 200 prisoners broke out. Most were killed in the breakout or in the German pursuit. Around a dozen survived to liberation. The Janowska revolt is the small and largely forgotten counterpart to the better-known revolts at Treblinka and Sobibor.
The camp
Janowska was located on the outskirts of Lvov (Lwow in Polish, Lviv in Ukrainian), then capital of the German-occupied District of Galicia. The city had been Polish before the war, Soviet from September 1939 to June 1941, and then under German occupation. The pre-war Jewish population of Lvov of around 110,000 had been increased by refugees fleeing east in 1939 to around 220,000 by the time the Germans arrived. Within a few weeks of the German occupation, around 7,000 Jews had been murdered in the Lvov pogroms of late June and early July 1941, conducted partly by Ukrainian nationalist militias.
Janowska was set up in October 1941 as a forced labour camp for Lvov Jews working in German military supply workshops. It became, over the next two years, a combined labour and killing site. Prisoners were worked on the workshops and on quarry labour at the nearby Piaski sand quarry. Mass shootings of Jews from the surrounding region took place at Janowska on a regular basis. The site was also used as a transit point for deportations to Bełżec.
The commandant for most of the camp’s career was the SS officer Friedrich Warzok, with the day-to-day operations supervised by men including Gustav Wilhaus and Wilhelm Rokita. The personal sadism of the senior officers at Janowska is documented at a level that stands out even by the standards of the wider camp system. Wilhaus shot prisoners as target practice from his villa balcony. Rokita ran an orchestra of Jewish musicians who were forced to play during executions; the orchestra members were themselves killed when their usefulness ended.
The work
The labour at Janowska was conducted under the most lethal conditions of any camp other than the dedicated extermination sites. Prisoners worked in the workshops or carried sand from the quarry in conditions designed to kill. The death rate from labour, beatings, and routine killing was around several per cent per day. The camp was constantly being replenished from new transports of Lvov-area Jews. Few prisoners lasted more than a few weeks.
The Sonderkommando 1005 detail
From spring 1943 the camp was used as a base for Sonderkommando 1005, the German operation to destroy the evidence of the eastern killings. A unit of around 130 Jewish prisoners was forced to exhume the bodies from mass graves around Lvov and Galicia and to burn them on improvised pyres. The work was psychologically catastrophic and was conducted under conditions designed to kill the prisoners themselves on completion. The unit knew this. They began planning an uprising.
The revolt of 19 November 1943
By November 1943 the Lvov region had been almost entirely cleared of Jews. The Sonderkommando 1005 detail at Janowska had completed most of the burning work. The camp itself was scheduled for liquidation. The remaining prisoners, including the Sonderkommando, knew they would be killed when the work was finished.
On 19 November 1943, as the German liquidation began, the prisoners attacked their guards. The Sonderkommando members had improvised weapons from kitchen tools and scraps of metal. Some had hidden small firearms taken from the camp armoury weeks earlier. The attack was sudden and uncoordinated. Several SS men and Ukrainian guards were killed. Around 200 prisoners broke out through the perimeter wire and ran for the surrounding fields.
The pursuit
The German pursuit was immediate. The escapers were hunted in the surrounding villages and fields by SS units and Ukrainian auxiliaries. The Polish and Ukrainian rural population was generally hostile and many escapers were betrayed for the German bounty. By the end of the following day, most of the escapers were dead. The killing of the remaining prisoners inside the camp continued for several days. By 21 November the camp had been liquidated. The total death toll at Janowska across its career, from the labour, the killings, and the Sonderkommando work, was around 200,000.
The survivors
Around a dozen of the Janowska escapers reached partisan units or sympathetic local hideouts and survived to liberation. Two of them gave detailed post-war testimony. Leon Weliczker Wells, who had been a member of the Sonderkommando 1005 detail, escaped in early November 1943 before the main revolt and survived. His memoir The Death Brigade, published in 1963, is the principal first-hand account of the Sonderkommando 1005 work. Yakob Eisenscher gave detailed testimony at the Nuremberg trials and at later Soviet investigations.
Why Janowska is less remembered
Janowska is one of the lesser-known major killing sites of the Holocaust. The reasons are several. The site was eliminated by the Germans in November 1943 and the surrounding territory was incorporated into the post-war Soviet Union; access for Western researchers was restricted for decades. The Soviet authorities treated the killings as part of the wider Soviet wartime experience rather than as specifically Jewish, in line with Soviet practice generally. The camp’s small number of survivors meant that the post-war literature was thin. Janowska is now part of the city of Lviv in independent Ukraine, with the camp site partly built over and partly preserved as a memorial. The recovery of the camp’s history has been a project of Ukrainian Jewish historians and the international Yad Vashem effort over the past two decades.
See also
Sources
- Leon Weliczker Wells, The Death Brigade (The Janowska Road), Holocaust Library, 1963
- Eliyahu Yones, Smoke in the Sand: The Jews of Lvov in the War Years 1939-1944, Gefen, 2004
- USHMM: Janowska