The Site of National Remembrance

About 0.5 km away from the Łambinowice seat of the Museum, there is the area of the former labor camp and the cemetery, in which those who had died in the camp were buried. The labor camp functioned in Łambinowice in the years 1945-1946, and the number of its victims is assessed at about 1.5 thousand people. The detained were mainly German civilians waiting to be resettled into the heart of Germany. Hard living conditions, hunger, diseases and bad treatment suffered from the camp’s personnel caused high mortality. The dead were buried in anonymous graves – individually or collectively.

For political reasons for more than half a century following the liquidation of the labor camp, the cemetery of its victims had existed solely in the consciousness of people who knew the history of this place. Commemorating the dead had not been possible until the 1990s. In 1995, there was a monument erected here, dedicated to the victims of the labor camp. Then, in 2000, survey exhumation of corpses was carried out, which confirmed the existence of mass graves in this area. The construction of the cemetery was realized in the years 2000-2002.

Straight in front of the cemetery’s gate, there was a wooden cross placed – the same that gave rise to the process of commemorating the victims of the camp in 1991. In front of the cross, there are 22 marble plaques. The first contains a fragment of an intentional prayer, the next two – the name of the cemetery and its founders; several other ones – the names and the surnames of 1 137 victims, which were successfully established by Polish and German researchers. The surnames were written in the alphabetical order, yet rendered in two parts, the reason for which were vital differences in the type of sources that the Polish and the German authors of the lists had used. In the area of the cemetery, we can find also stone slabs which have plaques on, bearing the names of 39 places situated locally, where the largest number of the isolated people and the dead victims of the Labor Camp in Łambinowice came from.