In my forty years of collecting and researching Holocaust-era postal items, I have found only one ghetto request card with a printed address (Figures 1 and 2). Collectors of Holocaust-era philately will know that the overwhelming majority of cards sent from the ghettos contained very neutral messages; a standard request card from the ghetto was preprinted by the ghetto government and directed to a family, requesting packages, food and money be sent to their relative in the ghetto. Usually, ghetto request cards did not have a preprinted address, but a written address. This unusual card led me to discover a little-known subcamp of KL Lublin (Majdanek), a concentration camp commonly held to be as deadly as Auschwitz, and the topic of “Prisoner Mail System in KL Lublin/Majdanek” in this same issue [available to read on our website here] This address is Lipowa 7, which was a park in the Polish city of Lublin before it was turned into a labor camp by the Schutzstaffel (SS) in 1939.
Figure 2. The reverse side of the request card in Figure 1. The writing in green is a name, Lili, and specific address. The translation reads:
To the family Hirszfeld Litzmannstadt
Hirszfeld, Marceli-Oskar is now located in Lublin, he is healthy and he greets you via our agency.
Letters, Money transfers, food and clothing packages, etc., should be addressed to the Judenrat Lublin, Camp Lipowa 7.
Lublin, Feb. 7, 1941. Judenrat in Lublin. Reporting and Information Office
On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland, effectively beginning the Second World War. Poland’s ill-equipped army was no match for the overwhelming power of the Wehrmacht. On September 18, German forces entered the eastern city of Lublin, meeting with minimal resistance. Within days, the city succumbed to the German forces. Hundreds of Polish soldiers were taken prisoner, many of them Jews. The Nazis took 7 Lipowa Street, (Figure 3), at that time a large park and athletic field, and created a forced labor camp (Lipowa Street was renamed Lindenstrasse). In October, several hundred Polish and Jewish prisoners of war were forced to build a camp on Lipowa Street with barracks and workshops. A ghetto was organized in another part of Lublin into which all Jews were forced to move, and an administrative body, the Judenrat (Jewish council), was established to “govern” the ghetto under the Nazi authority.
In November, SS-Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik (who would be executed after the war for war crimes) took control of the ghetto and organized the workshops and factories at Lipowa 7. The workshops consisted of tailors, shoemakers, carpenters and watchmakers. In addition, small factories were erected to make tulle (fine mesh net fabric) and boxes. The laborers initially lived in the ghetto and commuted to the camp, taking their own tools with them. However, in the summer of 1940, the SS confined the laborers to the camp barracks, because many of the workers did not show up to work when they were supposed to or sent someone in their place.
Figure 3. A picture post card of the park and athletic field at Lipowa 7 before WWII.
First and foremost, Lipowa 7 was a work and penal camp for Polish and Jewish prisoners. Lipowa 7 also occasionally functioned as a transit camp where Nazis gathered slave laborers before shipping them off to other labor outposts. Due to overcrowding, some transports arriving at the camp resulted either in immediate work-selections or death for the prisoners not fit to work. Only prisoners capable of working were allowed to stay in Lipowa.
In December 1940 the SS Company Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke (DAW — German Equipment Works) or DAW Lindenstrasse (Lipowa Street) took over Lipowa 7. DAW was a German defense contractor with headquarters in Berlin, owned and operated by the Schutzstaffel. It consisted of a network of factories and camp workshops across German- occupied Europe, exploiting the prisoner slave labor from all Nazi concentration camps. This firm maintained the craft workshops in Lipowa 7. The slaves in Lipowa were also farmed out to other SS factories for work.
In July 1941, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler visited Lublin. One result of this visit was the transfer in October 1941 of several hundred prisoners from Lipowa 7 to work on the construction of the concentration camp at KL Lublin. Another group of Lipowa camp inmates was employed at the construction of the Flugplatz (Airfield) labor camp. After the commencement of Aktion Reinhardt, in which mass-killing extermination camps, including Treblinka and Bełżec, were built in Poland, Lipowa laborers had to unload and sort the goods brought directly from death camps. Aktion Reinhardt was a result of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, which developed the “Final Solution”: the wholesale destruction of Jewish people in Europe.
Poor access to provisions within Lipowa 7 forced prisoners employed outside the camp to attempt to smuggle food inside. There were also incidents of stealing from the camp warehouses which, when detected, were punished by execution. The meager provisions available to Lipowa 7 inmates were to some extent supplemented with parcels sent to individual families within the ghetto, which stopped arriving after the outbreak of the Soviet-German conflict in June of 1941. In May and June of 1941, 2,550 and 2,316 parcels respectively were sent to Lipowa 7. In August, only 335 packages were received. The entirety of Lublin’s correspondence, postal orders, and parcels were delivered by the Postal Department, which was operated by the Lublin Judenrat under Nazi direction.
Supplies and money were very hard to obtain in the ghetto. The Judenrat had to reach outside the city to help supplement the supplies. As with other ghettos, the Judenrat administration of the Lublin ghetto sent out post cards to family members in other towns and cities asking for funds or packages to be sent to ghetto inmates. As printed on the card in Figures 1 and 2, packages would be received at the address Camp Lipowa 7. The sender of the request card, Marceli Hirszfeld, from Łódź (renamed Litzmannstadt in 1940), had been a soldier in the Polish army. At the time of his writing, he had been captured and sent to Lipowa 7. The request card, addressed to Marceli’s family in the Litzmannstadt ghetto, is preprinted with a neutral message. Translated, the preprinted text reads:
To the family _______________
_________ is now located in Lublin, he is healthy and he greets you via our agency.
Letters, Money transfers, food and clothing packages, etc., should be addressed to the Judenrat Lublin, Camp Lipowa 7.
Figure 4. An acknowledgement post card from Lipowa 7 inmate, Polish soldier Rachmiel Spring. This card, mailed back to the relief organization RELICO, indicates that the addressee received the package. In lower left, note the hand stamp from the Judenrat in Lublin.
Other surviving pieces of postal history from Lipowa 7 tell familiar stories for Holocaust-era historians. Figure 4 shows a package response card sent from Lipowa 7 by Rachmiel Spring, a Polish soldier from Łódź, to RELICO indicating that he received the parcel of food. RELICO (Relief Committee for the War Stricken Jewish Population) worked with the International Committee of the Red Cross on a number of relief efforts during World War II and after. One of RELICO’s efforts was to send food packages to many Polish ghettos and cities from its headquarters in Geneva. Included in each package was a preprinted reply card, which when returned would acknowledge receipt of the package and indicate that the recipient was alive.
Figure 5. This parcel receipt card is addressed to Lipowa 7; receipt cards were used to alert the addressee of a package. The card was mailed from Tuchów bei (at) Tarnów and dated August 25, 1941. Note the double ring hand cancel, the Brühl Palace, Warsaw, Generalgouvernement stamp, and the “General Gouvernement” 50 Gr (groschen) overprint (1940) on the Polish Edward Rydz-Śmigły 1937 definitive stamp.
Figure 5 is a parcel receipt card addressed to Lipowa 7. The package, addressed from the city of Tuchów, Poland, was sent to Lindel Gzunberg, who was also a Polish soldier captured and sent to Lipowa 7. The parcel receipt card informs the addressee of an incoming package. The card in Figure 5 is dated August 25, 1941. By this time, incoming parcels to Lublin were few, and supplements to the rations within the ghetto and Lipowa 7 camp were trickling to a near-standstill.
In the early hours of the morning on the 3rd of November 1943, Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival) was carried out at KL Lublin and other camps in the Lublin area, including the work camp on 7 Lipowa Street. The camps were surrounded by SS officers who marched the Jewish prisoners out to the killing fields and arranged them in rows, where they were forced to dig ditches for their own graves. Then the soldiers shot the slave laborers. At the end of the operation, over 42,000 Jews were killed.
As a result of the mass murder committed on Jewish prisoners, Lipowa 7 was left devoid of a work force. In effect, the production had to be halted, but previous work contracts were still binding. Therefore, the DAW Company was reorganized throughout the entire area of the Generalgouvernement (General Government — the German zone of occupation). In Lublin, only the workhouses at Lipowa 7 were reactivated, and the camp was renamed as a branch of KL Lublin. It was redesigned to serve as a workplace for 250 skilled craftsmen and 1,500 unskilled workers, among them many French citizens. The first transports of prisoners to be used as forced labor for the newly reactivated camp were sent at the end of January 1944 from concentration camps Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Buchenwald. On February 1, 1944, camp production officially restarted. Wooden and metal items as well as baskets for grenades were manufactured here.
For the last months of its existence, Lipowa Camp was an outer camp of KL Lublin with only a small group of prisoners working there. On July 22, 1944, the camp was liquidated. The remaining 229 inmates were sent to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Only one day later, July 23, 1944, KL Lublin was liberated by the Red Army. The last concentration camp would not be liberated until May 9, 1945, nearly a year later.
Holocaust philately does not offer solace, nor does it provide easy explanations to those who seek answers to this tragedy. A single post card can only offer a small piece of insight into the unique journeys of victims of the Nazi reign of terror. Marceli Hirszfeld, Rachmiel Spring, Lindel Gzunberg.
The heavy responsibility of preserving and remembering these lives is in our hands.
References and Further Resources
Webb, Chris. “Lipowa Street Camp.” Last modified July 2006. http:// www.deathcamps.org/lublin/lipowa.html
“Memorial to the Victims of the Lipowa 7 Labor Camp.” http://chelm.freeyellow.com/lipowa7.html
Chmielewski, Jakub. “Work Camp for Jews at 7 Lipowa Street in Lublin.” Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre. http://teatrnn.pl/lexi-con/articles/work-camp-for-jews-at-7-lipowa-street-in-lublin/
Minars Esther (trans). “Lipowa Camp Labor Camp and Camp for Jewish Prisoners of War in Lublin.” Last modified June 2011. https://kollublin.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/lipowa-camp-labor- camp-and-camp-for-jewish-prisoners-of-war-in-lublin-neta- zytomirski-avidar/
“Lublin — The Labour Camps.” Holocaust Education & Archive
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my friend Howard Weiss for his help with translation and editing.
Editor's Note: The article "Food, packages etc should be addressed to Camp Lipowa 7" was published in the April 2020 issue of The American Philatelist, available exclusively to members of the American Philatelic Society. Click here to view the full issue.