Bereza Kartuska prison

History

The institution was created on July 12, 1934, in a former Tsarist prison and barracks at Bereza Kartuska on the authority of a June 17, 1934, order issued by Polish President Ignacy Mościcki. The event that directly influenced Poland's de facto dictator, Józef Piłsudski, to create the prison was the assassination of Polish Minister of Internal Affairs Bronisław Pieracki on June 15, 1934, by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). It was intended to accommodate persons "whose activities or conduct give reason to believe that they threaten the public security, peace or order."

The Bereza Kartuska prison was organized by the director of the Political Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Wacław Żyborski, and the head of that Department's Nationalities Section (Wydział Narodowościowy), Colonel Leon Jarosławski. The institution was later supervised by the Governor of Polesie Province, Colonel Wacław Kostek-Biernacki. In the view of some historians, Kostek-Biernacki did not serve as commandant; they identify its commandants as police inspectors Bolesław Greffner (whose given name is sometimes stated as "Jan"), of Poznań, and Józef Kamala-Kurhański. Officially, Bereza Kartuska was not a part of Poland's penitentiary system, and the staff was composed of policemen, sent there as a punishment, rather than professional prison guards.

Individuals were incarcerated at Bereza Kartuska by administrative decision, without right of appeal, for three months, although this term was often extended while Colonel Wacław Kostek-Biernacki served as its commander. The average prisoner would spend 8 months in the camp. In the first three years of its history, the camp incarcerated people perceived as subversives and political opponents of the ruling Sanation regime. Recidivists and financial criminals were also detained starting from October 1937. Citizens suspected of pro-German sympathies were first detained in Bereza in middle 1938. In the first days of the September Campaign of 1939, Polish authorities started mass arrests of people suspected of such sympathies. Some members of the German minority in Poland were detained in whole families, including women (previously never detained in the camp).

The camp de facto ceased to exist on the night of September 17–18, 1939 when, after learning about the Soviet invasion of Poland, the staff had abandoned it. According to two reports, the departing policemen murdered some prisoners.

Inmates

According to the surviving documentation of the camp, more than 3000 people were overall detained in Bereza Kartuska from July 1934 until August 29, 1939. However, the camp's authorities stopped formally registering detainees in September 1939, after mass arrests began. According to incomplete data from Soviet sources, at least 10,000 people had gone through the prison.

Reasons for arrest

Prisoners included members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Polish Communist Party (KPP) and National Radical Camp (ONR), as well as members of the People's Party (SL) and Polish Socialist Party (PPS). The detainees included Bolesław Piasecki and, for some dozen days, the journalist Stanisław Mackiewicz (the latter, paradoxically, a warm supporter of the prison's establishment). Also a number of Belarusians who had resisted Polonization found themselves in the camp.

The first inmates - Polish ONR activists - arrived on July 17, 1934. A few days later, OUN activists arrived: Roman Shukhevych, Dmytro Hrytsai and Volodymyr Yaniv. By August 1939, Ukrainians constituted 17 percent of prisoners.

In April 1939, 38 members of Karpacka Sicz organization were detained in the camp. They were ethnic Ukrainians, previously residing in the Carpathian Ruthenia region of Czechoslovakia, where they were attempting to create an independent Ukrainian state. After this region was annexed by Hungary, Hungarian authorities deported them to Poland, whey they were sent to Bereza Kartuska. Unlike other prisoners, they didn't have to perform any labours and had the right to freely talk to each other in low voice.

Some political prisoners, including prominent Ukrainian political activists such as Mykola Lebed and Stefan Bandera, either escaped or were released from prisons by Polish authorities in early September 1939.

Reason for detention by percentage of inmates:

Known inmates

Conditions

From 1934–37, the facility usually housed 100–500 inmates at a time. In April 1938 the number went up to 800. Conditions were exceptionally harsh, and only one inmate managed to escape. Only one suicide occurred; on 5 February 1939, inmate Dawid Cymerman slit his throat in a toilet. The number of deaths in detention was kept artificially low by releasing prisoners who were in poor health. According to Śleszyński, 13 inmates died during the facility's operation, most of them at a hospital in Kobryń. In othes sources, the total number of deaths, is variously given as between 17 and 20. This number is also repeated in recent sources; for example, Norman Davies in God's Playground (1979) gives the number of deaths as 17.

Ukrainian historian, Viktor Idzio, states that according to official statistics, 176 men – by unofficial Polish statistics, 324 Ukrainians – were murdered or tortured to death during questioning, or died from disease, while escaping, or disappeared without trace. According to Idzio, most were OUN members.

In early 1938, the Polish government suddenly increased the number of inmates by sending 4,500 Ukrainians to Bereza Kartuska without right of appeal.

OUN members who were incarcerated at Bereza Kartuska have testified to the use there of torture. There were frequent beatings (with boards being placed against inmates' backs and struck with hammers), forced labor, constant harassment, the use of solitary confinement without provocation, punishment for inmates' use of the Ukrainian language, etc.

Prisoners were accommodated within the main compound, in a three-story brick building. A small white structure served for solitary confinement (in Ukrainian, "kartser"; in Polish, "karcer"). South of the solitary-confinement structure was a well, and south of that was a bathing area. The whole compound was encircled by an electrified barbed-wire fence.

Across a road from this compound were the commandant's house and officers' barracks.

In the prisoners' building, each cell initially held 15 inmates. There were no benches or tables. In 1938 the number of inmates per cell was increased to up to 70. The floors were of concrete and were constantly showered with water so that inmates could not sit.

By the time they were released from Bereza Kartuska, many Ukrainians had had their health destroyed or had died. Taras Bulba-Borovetz, who later became otaman of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), developed epilepsy as a result of his stay in Bereza Kartuska.

Naming controversy

The Polish government called the institution "Miejsce Odosobnienia w Berezie Kartuskiej" ("Place of Isolation at Bereza Kartuska"). From the facility's inception, the Sanation regime's opponents openly criticized the legal basis for its establishment and operation, calling it a "concentration camp." This term was also used by Western media sources such as The Times, both during the interbellum and immediately after World War II. It was later popularized by communist propaganda, which cited the prison as evidence that Poland's prewar government had been a "fascist" regime (despite the fact that Piłsudski had regarded fascism as a menace and that some of his government's most immoderate attacks had been directed against home-grown fascism.) A number of modern non-Soviet sources have also characterized the facility as a concentration camp, including Yale University professor Timothy Snyder, the Library of Congress, and the Polish Nobel prize-winning author Czesław Miłosz. Ukrainian sources such as Kubijovych and Idzio representing the Ukrainian Nationalist camp of the interpretation of history also categorize Bereza Kartuska as a concentration camp. Polish-American historian Tadeusz Piotrowski who also calls it a concentration camp notes that the establishment of the facility was a norm of its times, similar to camps established by Americans for Japanese during World War II, by Canadians for Ukrainians during World War I, and – as also noted by Norman Davies – on a much smaller scale than those projects (not to mention the giant German or Soviet networks of concentration camps). In 2007, the Polish Embassy objected to the use of the term in a memorial plaque in Paris for the Bereza Kartuska inmate Aron Skrobek. Its objections were successful and the plaque instead described the facility as a seclusion camp.