The Great War and Its Landscapes Between Memory and Oblivion: the Case of Prisoners of War Camps in Tuchola and Czersk, Poland

Abstract

Many sites related to the First World War are forgotten and neglected in today's Poland. This paper shortly presents the ways of practicing Bconflict archaeology^in Poland and it discusses results of the non-invasive archaeological survey conducted in Tuchola and Czersk, places where during the First World War Germans built and run prisoners of war camps. In the article the material remains of the camps that have survived in the local landscapes till the present are analyzed. Both sites are at the same time remembered and forgotten by local communities. This paper tries to account for oblivion as an inherent part of local landscapes that adds a unique value to them.

Carceral and military geographies: Prisons, the military and war

“…An extensive literature now explores the history and experience of such facilities (e.g. Cowley, 2002;Havers, 2003), including reports on archaeological investigations: for example, of WWII internment camps at Fort Hood, Texas (Thomas, 2011); sites of Japanese-American internment (Camp, 2016); camps for British civilians on the Isle of Man (Mytum, 2011); internment camps operating in Francoist Spain (González-Ruibal, 2011); and WWI PoW camps in Poland (Kobiałka et al, 2017) and in the UK (Grady, 2019). The operational lives of many of these facilities ended with hostilities but, as Martin et al (2020) have noted, many former Nazi concentration camps in Europe were transformed into refugee 'assembly centres' after the end of WWII and used again to host refugees during the recent 'migration crisis' in Europe.…”

Difficult Heritage of the 20th Century from the Perspective of the Biography of Things

“…One of the camps was located near Czersk. The history and archaeology of the camp has already been discussed in detail (Kajda et al 2017;Kobiałka et al 2017;Kobiałka 2018).…”

100 years later: the dark heritage of the Great War at a prisoner-of-war camp in Czersk, Poland

“…One of the German POW camps was Kriegsgefangenenlager Czersk (Figure 1), operational between 1914 and 1918. The site has been of scientific interest to the author and colleagues since 2015; the history and archaeology of the camp and preliminary research results have already been published (Kobiałka et al 2017). Only the aspects of the camp's past that are relevant to the issue of difficult heritage are therefore highlighted here.…”

“…Archaeological research has now reclaimed some of these memories (Kobiałka et al . 2017). Yet even in such dark and traumatic heritage as the Czersk camp, something affirmative can be discerned: a small, aluminium Russian canteen offers a different insight into dark heritage.…”