Dorohucza

In March 1943, a labor camp was established in Dorohucza, about thirty kilometres east of Lublin. It consisted of three substandard barracks for prisoners, one barrack for SS men, one barrack for Ukrainian guards and one kitchen barrack. The prisoner barracks were surrounded by a fence while the other barracks were located outside the fence. About 500 prisoners were imprisoned in the camp, majority of them Jews from Holland deported to Sobibor, but escaped death in the gas chambers by being selected for slave labour. In Dorohucza, they were forced to work on mining peat in a nearby field. The camp commandant was SS-Hauptscharführer, Gottfried Schwarz, who previously served in Sobibor extermination camp. The camp in Dorohucza only existed til November 3, 1943, when the camp’s Jews were murdered as part in a large scale killing operation. That day/night around 18,000 Jews in various camps in Lublin district were killed on orders of SS chief, Heinrich Himmler. The reason was that several uprisings in both ghettos and camps took place earlier in the year and Himmler wanted to avoid more uprisings. The camp was subsequently demolished.