A few days after the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising (5 August 1944), soldiers of the scout battalion “Zośka” of the Home Army captured “Gesiowka” – a fortified concentration camp-prison for Jews, set up by the Germans in occupied Warsaw during World War II. It was located on Gęsia Street, on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, which was liquidated in 1943. The insurgents managed to free 348 Jews from many countries conquered by the Germans.
From the end of the 19th century, when Poland was under partition, the former barracks on Gęsia Street in Wola housed a tsarist military prison. During the German occupation it served as the central jail, but in the second half of 1943 the Germans established the KL Warschau concentration camp on those premises. It operated from July 1943 to August 1944 and its full name was Konzentrationslager Warschau. It is widely believed that the site was part of the “destruction of the Polish city of Warsaw” as part of the Pabst Plan. It envisaged the creation of a “new German city” on the ruins of the Polish capital. The decision to establish the camp was taken by Heinrich Himmler in February 1943.
The historians estimate that 20,000 prisoners were sent to the camp, mostly Jews, but also Poles. “Gesiowka” eventually became a branch of the Majdanek concentration camp located in the Lublin area. Wilhelm Goecke became the first commandant of KL Warschau, but the camp’s staff included not only Germans.
The first prisoners were sent to the newly established camp in the 2nd half of July 1943. There were 300 former Buchenwald concentration camp prisoners; some of them were criminals who later served as camp kapos. Then several transports of prisoners from Auschwitz were sent to the camp. For the most part, they were Jews coming from the many European countries conquered by Germany. Their selection was not random; their unfamiliarity with the Polish language was intended to prevent them from making any contact with the inhabitants of Warsaw. The prisoners worked at demolishing the remains of the former ghetto buildings, extracting all kinds of materials from the rubble that could be used in any way by the Germans. Some prisoners were put to work burning the corpses of Poles shot in mass executions in Warsaw. Most of them had previously been incarcerated in the Pawiak prison next to KL Warschau. Jews still hiding in the ruins of the ghetto were also murdered in many executions. The bodies of prisoners who died within the camp were also burned. As one surviving prisoner Dawid Mehl recalled after the war, “the whole area was permeated with the smell of burnt bodies and human bones”.
KL Warschau encompassed the area along Gesia Street, between Zamenhof, Wolynska, Ostrowska, Gliniana and Okopowa Streets At the end of July 1944, the Germans began the evacuation of “Gesiowka”, organising the departure of around 4,000 prisoners. Most of them were sent to Dachau, with about 400 remaining to help with the camp’s liquidation.
The Warsaw insurgents, considering the military objectives, did not have to attack Gesiowka – they could have bypassed it. However, they decided otherwise. Capturing it was not easy. Tadeusz Zuchowicz a.k.a. “Marek”, who served in the Home Army in the “Zośka” battalion, remembered that ” Gesiowka consisted of a number of wooden barracks, painted green. It was surrounded by a high concrete wall with guard towers with machine guns. A heavy iron gate was the only entrance to the camp”.
During the operation, it was decided to use one of the two German PzKpfw V Panther tanks captured by the insurgents on 2 August, which went to the Independent Armoured Platoon “Wacek”, commanded by Lt Waclaw Micuta. Three platoons of the “Zośka” battalion also took part in the storming of the camp: “Felek”, “Alek” and a platoon from the “Giewont” battalion. A tank named “Magda” by the insurgents played a key role in the attack on the camp.
When the Panther moved down Gęsia Street towards the camp gate on 5 August, the guards did not notice the insurgent markings on it, thinking that it was a German force sent to their aid. As a result, the insurgents unhindered crossed the two barricades separating the insurgent positions from the ghetto ruins and drove straight towards the camp gate. When the guards opened fire with machine guns, the bullets did not cause any harm to “Magda”.
This is how Capt. Ryszard Białous aka “Jerzy”, commander of the Home Army “Zośka” Battalion, remembered the moment of the liberation of “Gesiowka”: “Germans are fleeing out of the buildings and towers in disorderly groups, retreating into the ruins of the Old Town. The doors of the barracks burst open under the onslaught, and the whole foreground was filled with a mass of figures in stripes running towards us with incredible shouting and waving of hands. For a moment I felt my throat squeeze with a spasm of joy, we made it in time.”
348 prisoners were released from the camp, including 24 women. They were Jews from Poland, Hungary, Belgium, France, Greece, the Netherlands and Norway. Many of them joined the insurgent units. They served in the quartermaster department, among others. In addition, Henryk Lederman, a pre-war infantry cadet and participant in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, became a soldier in the tank platoon of ‘Zośka’ battalion, while engineer Józef Filar was a mechanic in this platoon. The medical service in the battalion was performed by surgeon Soltan Safiyev ‘Doctor Turek’, a former military doctor of the Red Army. Henryk Poznański aka “Bystry”, also a participant in the ghetto uprising, was assigned to the AK “Parasol” Battalion.
After the war, the German camp “Gęsiówka” became a place used by the Soviets. This time there was a camp there – at first an NKVD camp for German prisoners of war, but also for soldiers of the Home Army and other formations of the Polish independence underground. In mid-1945, the management of the camp was taken over by the native Communist Security Office, without changing its purpose. The camp was transformed into the Warsaw II Gesiowka Central Prison for political and criminal prisoners, where 1800 people died, according to historians’ estimates.
Gesiowka was liquidated in 1956 and the remains of the building were demolished in the 1960s.