I haven't seen Józef Górski's memoirs referenced elsewhere, and he had some interesting things to say about the German occupation of Poland, especially around the Treblinka area.
During the war, he owned land in the Ceranow region.
His full memoirs don't seem to be digitized, but there are some excerpts in a journal article. DOI link with PDF.
I don't see anything groundbreaking in his work, but it has a few interesting themes that others might benefit from reading. The memoirs were published in 1960, so there could be over a decade of corrupted/influenced memories filtering in.
Border Infrastructure Projects
Someone else might be able to correlate labor camps to these infrastructure improvements Górski mentions. These are all projects he attributes to the Germans after the occupation of Poland.
- straightening and regulating the stream flowing through Sokolow
- building a concrete road from Kossow to Malkinia through meadows and marshes (spring 1941)
- regulate the Bug river, connect the Bug via canal with the Vistula, build a hydroelectric plant on the Bug (1942, Organisation Todt in charge)
- projected main line from Kharkov to Calais
On Jews in Poland
Górski also wrote about the Jews in Poland, crediting the Nazis for drawing attention to the "threat of international Jewry." He saw Polish Jews as a polyp on the organism of Poland. He has some accounts of German atrocities against Jews, and treacherous Jews who handed over others Jews to the Germans.
The Zollgrenzschutz (German customs & border guards) also get a mention. Local Poles from Długie Kamieńskie (a little east of Malkinia/Treblinka) were capturing refugees and robbing them before the Zollgrenzschutz could arrest them.
As a Christian, he sympathized with the Jews and hired hundreds of them to work his fields. As a Pole, he was glad to see them go, writing that "in the inter-war period, every gang involved in the slave trade, pornography, money forgery or communist propaganda was headed by a Jew."
Overall, he expressed satisfaction that there were 4 million fewer Jews in Poland after the war. He accepts the death tolls of 2 million Poles and 4 million Jews.
More Treblinka Confusion
On the train to Treblinka, he says the Jews tore up all their banknotes and threw them out the windows, where local Poles would gather them up.
Most interestingly, Górski is another Pole who has no conception of the difference between the Treblinka labor camp and the extermination camp.
He mentions the 1943 Treblinka revolt, says the escaped Jews joined the Home Army, and then betrayed the Polish Home Army to the Soviets.
Despite Ceranow being within the 20km radius around Treblinka, what is published of his memoirs don't mention the constant stench of rotting bodies in a wax-fat transformation being dug up, burned on pyres all day, then reburied, then the earth swirled up with excavators, where ash was deposited on top of additional corpses in a wax-fat transformation. So that's an omission.
