In 1944, the AL Friedland camp for Jews – a branch of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp – was opened in Mieroszów. On 8 September 1944, the first transport from KL Auschwitz arrived in the town, comprising 300 Polish Jews originally deported from Litzmannstadt Ghetto. The camp was located ca. 1 km away from the town, by the road to Wałbrzych (now called Wałbrzyska Street). The prisoners worked in the VDM (Vereinigte Deutsche Metallwerke) factory, which had been relocated from Hamburg. They worked at adit excavation and laying rails and railroad ties. The camp was liberated by the Soviet Army on 9 May 1945. Some 488 prisoners managed to survive. In total, at least 714 Jews were imprisoned in AL Friedland. They have been commemorated with a monument designed by Stanisław Olszamowski. Located in Wałbrzyska Street in Mieroszów, it bears the inscription: “AL Friedland /Mieroszow/ 8.09.1945-9.05.1945. In memory of the 515 prisoners of the Gross-Rosen camp branch.”

After the end of World War II, a group of former camp prisoners decided to remain in Mieroszów (at the time called Frydlant). At their initiative, a hospital for ex-prisoners was set up in the town, with Arnold Mostowicz as its first director. In addition, a sanatorium was opened near Sokołowsko (then called Jar), also headed by Mostowicz. In 1946, transports of so-called Jewish repatriates from the Soviet Union arrived in Mieroszów. A total of 1,000 Jews lived in the town in July 1946, but most of them emigrated by the end of the 1940s. In the years 1946–1947, Mieroszów was one of the largest centres of illegal Jewish emigration from Poland due to its proximity to the green border. Several Jewish organisations were active in the town.

The Description

The Jewish cemetery in Mieroszów was established during the period of World War II and the operation of the AL Friedland camp. The Germans started to bury Jewish prisoners on a hill located in the vicinity of the Protestant graveyard. The bodies were first piled up on camp premises (in front of the concrete shelter on the barrack square) and later loaded onto carts and transported to the cemetery by a group of prisoners selected by the SS. Upon reaching the site, the prisoners dragged the corpses from the carts up to the graves on derricks, which proved to be particularly difficult during the winter, as the hill on which the cemetery was located was covered with ice. The dead were buried in pits without coffins.

One prisoner recalled it as follows: “At the time I was working with three other prisoners in the group tasked with burying the dead. We had a flat cart, designed to be carried by horses, but we dragged it instead. Almost every day the cart was filled to the brim. We stacked the corpses in layers crosswise so that they would not slip, and we would not lose them when we pulled the cart through the town to the field where we buried the dead. […] After loading, other prisoners helped me push and pull the cart filled with the exposed skeletons through the entire town to a field near the local cemetery – not an easy task for starving prisoners.”

A total of at least 123 people were buried in the cemetery – this was the number recorded in a report drawn up by the Commissary Mayor of Frydlant (Mieroszów). The document was prepared based on materials from the Jewish Committee in Mieroszów and the local Jewish Religious Community. The deceased were buried in a total of 37 graves, 20 of which were mass graves. Among them were not only inmates of the AL Friedland camp, but also Jews evacuated from the Owl Mountains or prisoners of Auschwitz subcamps whose transports passed through Mieroszów in January and February 1945. They were all shot by the Germans. Aleksandra Kobielec has identified the names of 118 Jews buried in the Mieroszów cemetery between 1944 and 1945.  The earliest recorded date of death was 18 September 1944 and the latest – 19 April 1945.

After World War II, the site of the cemetery was cleaned up on the initiative of one of the former AL Friedland prisoners, David Paluch, who settled in Mieroszów and served as the rabbi and chairman of the Jewish religious community. In the first post-war years, a wooden fence was erected around the necropolis, and in 1947 a commemorative plaque was placed at the site, dedicated to the Jewish prisoners buried in the cemetery (it remained there until at least the 1950s).

After 1945, the cemetery was used as a burial site for Mieroszów Jews. Several damaged tombstones from the 1940s have survived to the present day, including those of Zew Zilbering, Jakob Krongold, Chai Sura Szejnker, Leib Hamburger, Mordechai Kriwin, or Ozjasz Sztar.

The cemetery was officially closed by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs in 1961. At that time, its total area amounted to 0.18 hectares. The site was unfenced and held several fallen concrete gravestones and the mass grave of World War II victims with a plaque.

Today, the cemetery is located in Parkowa Street, to the west of the active municipal cemetery, and occupies plot no. 40/3. It can be accessed from the municipal cemetery, through a gate in the fence. The cemetery is owned by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland.

Between 2014 and 2017, clean-up works were carried out at the site. The area was tidied up, self-sown trees were removed, and a metal mesh fence was installed. In addition, a granite obelisk commemorating one of the Jewish prisoners buried at the cemetery was placed at the site.

Author of the note: Tamara Włodarczyk

Bibliography

• Bielawski K., “Częściowy spis osób pochowanych na cmentarzu żydowskim w Mieroszowie,” Cmentarze żydowskie w Polsce, http://cmentarze-zydowskie.pl/mieroszow.
• Führer durch die jüdische Gemeindeverwaltung und Wohlfahrtspflege in Deutschland 1932-1933 / herausgegeben von der Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Deutschen Juden, B. Schlesinger (ed.), Berlin 1933.
• Grajek S., Po wojnie i co dalej, Żydzi w Polsce w latach 1945-1949, Warszawa 2003.
• Kobielec A., AL Friedland. Filia KL Gross-Rosen w Mieroszowie, Wałbrzych 2014.
• Wieczorek P., Żydzi w Wałbrzychu i powiecie wałbrzyskim 1945–1968, Wrocław–Warszawa 2017.

Właściciel praw autorskich do opisu: Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich POLIN.