Memoria [EN] No. 52 (1/2022) | Page 14

THE UNKNOWN MANUSCRIPT

FROM CHEŁMNO

The staff of the camp in Chełmno benefited from forced labour of Jewish workers during the entire period of the functioning of the facility (1941–1943, 1944–1945). The groups consisting of several dozen men, including gravediggers, artisans and order workers, shared the same fate. As direct witnesses of the crime, they made an attempt to write down, briefly and in hurry, both their personal as well as collective experience connected with incarceration and forced labour. These documents, usually consisting of small items, written down on random pieces of paper, in strict confidence and under strong feeling of danger, then hidden with great difficulty, constitute shocking records of the fate of incarcerated Jews. Until recently, only five random notes of this kind were known.

One more document was discovered in 2018, entitled Odezwa do naszych braci! (The address to our brothers!). Together with the attached small metal tin, it was anonymously submitted to the Museum of the former Kulmhof Extermination Camp in Chełmno nad Nerem. Its scientific analysis followed, undertaken at the conservator’s workshop of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. It confirmed the authenticity of the manuscript, making it possible to present its form and content. Conservation and restoration works that followed, carried out under the supervision of conservator Agnieszka Zięba, constituted a compromise between preserving legible traces of the history of this document – dramatic circumstances of its creation, hiding and unclear fate after WW2, and protecting it against complete destruction.

It is a one-sided manuscript, written with the use of a graphite pencil, on paper substrate with the dimensions of 14 x 20 cm. The paper is light brown, it represents the characteristics of low-quality paper and advanced ageing processes. Upon its forwarding for conservation the manuscript was folded once, with its text exposed to the outside, to the format 14 x 10 cm. The analysis unveiled that originally, it was for a long time folded four times to form a small cube and in this way stored for a long time in a metal tin, most probably constituting its hiding place.

Due to important deficiencies of the writing material as well as nearly illegible text, it was possible to decipher exclusively some fragments of the text that consists of 23 rows written without margins. The content is similar to Odezwa do naszego przyszłego narodu (The address to our future nation), one of the already known documents prepared by the inmates. The title of the discovered memo suggests its similar content. Both texts are dated December 1st 1944. It is possible that they were written by the same person, most probably Izrael Zygelman, one of the initiators of the document entitled Testament ostatnich więźniów (The testament of last prisoners), the most extensive document produced by the inmates.

This unique document, disclosed so many years after WW2, constitutes another poignant testimony of the fate of last camp prisoners who, with the use of simple words, made an attempt to give their fate a name and describe it. Driven by a desperate need to record both personal as well as collective experience, they took over the responsibility for revealing the truth about the crime. Their words became the voice of all victims of the camp in Chełmno.

The document was presented during the events commemorating the 80th anniversary of establishing the first German extermination camp within the territory of Poland in Chełmno. Its content, together with the description of conservation works, was presented in the paper:

M. Grzanka, A. Zięba, Nazwali to, że biorą na robotę. Dokumenty osobiste więźniów niemieckiego obozu zagłady w Chełmnie, Chełmno 2021. The artifact is included in the collections of the Museum under inventory number CH/1450.

Odezwa do naszych braci! (The address to our brothers!) is the priceless unknown historiographical document written by the last Jewish prisoners-workers incarcerated at the German Nazi extermination camp in Chełmno (German Kulmhof) in the years 1944-1945.

Małgorzata Grzanka*