Waldeslust found
After much research and with invaluable help from Peter Jackson we have now found what we think is a photograph of the slave labour camp for the Jewish women transported from Auschwitz to Hambuhren-Ovelgonne known as ‘Waldeslust”, the camp where Esther was a prisoner from August 44 until February 45
According to Peter the photo was taken in 1951 and was found in a small book about Hambuhren during the war, written by a local resident Rainer Fabisch. Peter says “The Waldeslust photo shows it to be a pleasantly wooded place with no sign of any of the conditions that the camp inmates had to cope with.horrors. It looks a perfectly habitable place and may have been used to house some of the thousands of refugees from what was eastern Germany and became part of Poland after the war”
In Peter Jackson’s book on Hambuhren he describes Waldeslust as
‘one of three sub-camps of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, some ten miles away. It was built in 1942 and at first housed Russian POW’s, Dutch workers and from February 1944, British and Canadian airmen. Called on some maps the ‘Judenlager’ or ‘Jewish Camp’, it was concealed in woodland on the edge of Ovelgonne on what is now the road from Hambuhren to Oldau. It was surrounded by barbed wire and cut off from the rest of the camps and from the outside world. It had the rather picturesque name of Waldeslust, literally “woodland joy”, and it functioned as a concentration camp from August 1944, when prisoners were being transferred westwards from Auschwitz-Birkenau which was being closed down as the Russians advanced towards it.
The camp lasted for just six months, until February 1945, when it too was closed and its prisoners moved on foot to Belsen.