Book contents
24 - Aftermath
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2023
Summary
Once the immediate area had been liberated by the Red Army, and the Germans finally routed, local civilians helped to bury the remains of the slaughtered prisoners in a communal grave in the camp grounds. Piotr Olej recalls that 239 bodies were recovered and that in the early 1960s the bodies were exhumed. They were taken to the nearby Leśny Cmentarz (Forest Cemetery), which, according to a local historian, Jacek Zając, had already been used since late 1942 to bury prisoners from the various Fürstengrube camps. The graves are unmarked; Zając said that what might look like individual burial mounds are tokenistic, since Klein and his fellow prisoners are in a communal, unmarked, relatively shallow plot. The details of the exhumation and reburial have been lost in the mists of a dark, Communist past. Russians and Germans killed in January 1945 are also buried there, and a separate part of the cemetery contains the graves of German POWs, who worked the mines after the war. A local conservation group tidies up the whole site each year. But in truth, the cemetery was never intended to be a formal, cultivated place, since the wartime and post-war burials were perfunctory at best. Today, this clearing is the closest one can get to Klein's mortal remains. But, thanks to Zając as a worthy and sensitive guide, I was able to light a memorial candle and recite traditional Jewish prayers at this eerily peaceful site in a Silesian forest.
Soon after the war, the war-crimes trials began, and in addition to those individuals who contributed to Klein's murder, and were caught, tried and executed, there were too many who evaded justice. IG Farben, the company which owned the Fürstengrube mine and stood at the centre of Hitler's industrial might, running a whole series of slave-labour camps, was put on corporate trial at Nuremberg. It offered a cynical defence, arguing that the inhumane conditions in their camps, mines and factories were as a direct result of the SS, corrupt prisoners and external building contractors, and that by giving prisoners work, the company had saved them from the gas chambers.
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- Don't Forget about MeThe Short Life of Gideon Klein, Composer and Pianist, pp. 277 - 282Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022