German concentration camp prisoners letters

Collection — Box: 1

Identifier: 6118

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

Two letters written from German concentration camps. The first is a letter from prisoner Stanislaw Konezarek at Gross-Rosen prisoner on official camp letter form, postmarked July 19, 1942. He writes to his wife in Litzmannstadt stating that he remains healthy and wonders why he has not received a letter from her. He tells her to arrange to have fuel for the winter and thanks her for sending money.

The second is from Jakob Smol, prisoner at Sachsenhausen, who writes to a woman, presumably his wife, dated May 2, 1943. "...I received the package...and the 15 Reichsmarks....How did you spend the holidays?...It has already been three years....I doubt that you are loyal to me....Our garden must probably be pretty."

[Bookseller's description]

Dates

Creation: 1942, 1943

Conditions Governing Access

Advance notice required for access.

Conditions Governing Use

All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Manuscripts Librarian. Permission for publication is given on behalf of Special Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained.

Historical note

Sachsenhausen concentration camp, located in Oranienburg, Germany, was established in 1936 and used primarily for political prisoners. Its location, 22 miles north of Berlin, gave it a primary position among German concentration camps, and in fact the administrative center of all the camps was in Oranienburg. Sachsenhausen was also a training center for SS officers. Gross-Rosen concentration camp, established in 1940 as a satellite of Sachsenhausen, was actually a network of close to 100 subcamps located in eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, and occupied Poland. At its peak in 1944, this network of camps housed 11% of the total number of inmates in Nazi concentration camps.