Camp Operation
A total of 34,932 people were imprisoned in the camp between 1945 and 1949. At first, the inmates were mainly "ethnic Germans" from the Volksliste (DVL) including some prisoners-of-war, but also women, and 1,285 children – most of them orphaned. The prisoners worked in several workshops on premises as well as in nearby farms owned by the camp administration (with the total area of 1,174.60 ha), between 6.30 a.m. and 17.30 p.m., with one hour break. Over time, they included fighters from the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) and prisoners of war from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania. Reported 2,915 inmates died from typhus and dysentery. It was the result of epidemic conditions prevailing in the camp, and the lack of medical care. The dead were buried in the mass graves. Other sources emphasize the total number of prisoners who died there since the inception of the camp in 1941 under the German administration, amounting roughly to 5,000 victims including Poles, Belarusians, Jews and Germans.
In 1950/1951, during the darkest years of Stalinist terror the camp was transformed into a prison for Polish political prisoners. Following the 1961 renovations and the subsequent replacement of barracks with cement structures, it became a prison mainly for criminal offenders. In 1974 a wall was erected around the perimeter. Today, the Penal Unit in Potulice is a state prison with space for 1,446 inmates (underaged, and first-time offenders, as well as criminally insane) featuring a medical clinic.
Read more about this topic: Central Labour Camp Potulice
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“Some of the taverns on this road, which were particularly dirty, were plainly in a transition state from the camp to the house.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)