ON 5 August 1994 a plaque inscribed in Polish and Hebrew was mounted on an external wall of a nondescript apartment building on 34 Mordechai Anielewicz Street in Warsaw. It reads: ‘On 5 August 1944 the “Zośka” scouts’ battalion of the “Rados ław” unit of the Armia Krajowa [Home Army, AK] captured the German concentration camp of “Gęsiówka” at this very spot and liberated 348 Jewish inmates, citizens of various countries in Europe. Many of them fought and fell in the Warsaw uprising.’

This modest plaque marks the site of an almost forgotten concentration camp whose official name was initially Konzentrationslager Warschau (Warsaw Concentration Camp) and subsequently Konzentrationslager Lublin—Arbeitslager Warschau (Lublin Concentration Camp—Warsaw Labour Camp), after it was annexed to the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin. But its common name in Poland is Gęsiówka because it stood at 45 Gęsia Street (now Mordechai Anielewicz Street) in the yard of the former ghetto prison of the same name.

Although the purpose of the plaque is to save the memory of this camp from oblivion, Gęsiówka continues to recede into history, eclipsed quite naturally in Jewish collective memory by the Nazi annihilation of Warsaw's Jewish community in 1942–3 and the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April and May 1943; and in Polish collective memory by the Polish uprising of August–October 1944 and the staggering suffering of Warsaw's inhabitants in the aftermath of the defeat of the revolt, when the Germans razed the city to the ground in retaliation.

The existence of this camp is hardly ever mentioned in standard accounts of the Holocaust. Gęsiówka was undoubtedly a minor camp in the grander scheme of things, but it dispensed its fair share of suffering. Thousands of Jews fell victim there to the Nazi policy of prisoner labour. In my estimation 4,000–5,000 of the 8,000–9,000 inmates who were impressed into prisoner labour in this camp between the summers of 1943 and 1944 perished in the innards of the beast. In the normal course of the camp's existence hundreds died from malnutrition, mistreatment, execution, or sheer exhaustion.