The American Philatelist April 2020

Figure 3. A picture post card of the park and athletic field at Lipowa
7 before WWII.
muted to the camp, taking their own tools with them. However,
in the summer of 1940, the SS confined the laborers to
the camp barracks, because many of the workers did not show
up to work when they were supposed to or sent someone in
their place.
First and foremost, Lipowa 7 was a work and penal camp
for Polish and Jewish prisoners. Lipowa 7 also occasionally
functioned as a transit camp where Nazis gathered slave laborers
before shipping them off to other labor outposts. Due
to overcrowding, some transports arriving at the camp resulted
either in immediate work-selections or death for the
prisoners not fit to work. Only prisoners capable of working
were allowed to stay in Lipowa.
In December 1940 the SS Company Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke
(DAW — German Equipment Works) or DAW
Lindenstrasse (Lipowa Street) took over Lipowa 7. DAW was
a German defense contractor with headquarters in Berlin,
owned and operated by the Schutzstaffel. It consisted of a
network of factories and camp workshops across Germanoccupied
Europe, exploiting the prisoner slave labor from
all Nazi concentration camps. This firm maintained the
craft workshops in Lipowa 7. The slaves in Lipowa were also
farmed out to other SS factories for work.
In July 1941, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler visited
Lublin. One result of this visit was the transfer in October
1941 of several hundred prisoners from Lipowa 7 to work
on the construction of the concentration camp at KL Lublin.
Another group of Lipowa camp inmates was employed at the
construction of the Flugplatz (Airfield) labor camp. After the
commencement of Aktion Reinhardt, in which mass-killing
extermination camps, including Treblinka and Bełżec, were
built in Poland, Lipowa laborers had to unload and sort the
goods brought directly from death camps. Aktion Reinhardt
was a result of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942,
which developed the “Final Solution”: the wholesale destruction
of Jewish people in Europe.
Poor access to provisions within Lipowa 7 forced prisoners
employed outside the camp to attempt to smuggle food
inside. There were also incidents of stealing from the camp
warehouses which, when detected, were punished by execution.
The meager provisions available to Lipowa 7 inmates
were to some extent supplemented with parcels sent to individual
families within the ghetto, which stopped arriving
after the outbreak of the Soviet-German conflict in June of
1941. In May and June of 1941, 2,550 and 2,316 parcels respectively
were sent to Lipowa 7. In August, only 335 packages
were received. The entirety of Lublin’s correspondence,
postal orders, and parcels were delivered by the Postal Department,
which was operated by the Lublin Judenrat under
Nazi direction.
Supplies and money were very hard to obtain in the
ghetto. The Judenrat had to reach outside the city to help
supplement the supplies. As with other ghettos, the Judenrat
administration of the Lublin ghetto sent out post cards to
family members in other towns and cities asking for funds
or packages to be sent to ghetto inmates. As printed on the
card in Figures 1 and 2, packages would be received at the address
Camp Lipowa 7. The sender of the request card, Marceli
Hirszfeld, from Łódź (renamed Litzmannstadt in 1940), had
been a soldier in the Polish army. At the time of his writing,
he had been captured and sent to Lipowa 7. The request card,
addressed to Marceli’s family in the Litzmannstadt ghetto, is
preprinted with a neutral message. Translated, the preprinted
text reads:
To the family
_________ is now located in Lublin, he is healthy
and he greets you via our agency.
Letters, Money transfers, food and clothing packages,
etc., should be addressed to the Judenrat Lublin,
Camp Lipowa 7.
Other surviving pieces of postal history from Lipowa 7
tell familiar stories for Holocaust-era historians. Figure 4
shows a package response card sent from Lipowa 7 by Rachmiel
Spring, a Polish soldier from Łódź, to RELICO indicating
that he received the parcel of food. RELICO (Relief Committee
for the War Stricken Jewish Population) worked with
the International Committee of the Red Cross on a number
of relief efforts during World War II and after. One of
RELICO’s efforts was to send food packages to many Polish
ghettos and cities from its headquarters in Geneva. Included
in each package was a preprinted reply card, which when
returned would acknowledge receipt of the package and indicate
that the recipient was alive.
Figure 5 is a parcel receipt card addressed to Lipowa 7.
The package, addressed from the city of Tuchów, Poland, was
sent to Lindel Gzunberg, who was also a Polish soldier captured
and sent to Lipowa 7. The parcel receipt card informs
the addressee of an incoming package. The card in Figure 5
is dated August 25, 1941. By this time, incoming parcels to
Lublin were few, and supplements to the rations within the
ghetto and Lipowa 7 camp were trickling to a near-standstill.
In the early hours of the morning on the 3rd of November
1943, Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival) was
carried out at KL Lublin and other camps in the Lublin area,
including the work camp on 7 Lipowa Street. The camps
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