Falkenberg Bernhard

Falkenberg, Bernhard During the war, Bernhard Falkenberg was the overseer of the Wlodawa labor camp in eastern Poland. The Sobibor extermination camp was only a few kilometers away, and work in the drainage project conducted by Falkenberg was the only safeguard against deportation. To protect his workers from the sporadic roundups carried out by the local Gestapo under their chief Nitschke, he gathered them in a fenced-off labor camp and issued them with special work cards. Though he was officially allowed only 500 Jewish workers, the actual number of Jews staying in the camp far exceeded that number. Thus, many of them lacked official work permits. To protect them from being rounded up by the Gestapo, Falkenberg would warn them in advance of impending Aktionen. The “redundant” Jews could then hide in the bunker near Falkenberg’s house: a huge barn walled off all around by haystacks. In 1943, at the time of the final liquidation of the camp, Falkenberg bribed the Ukrainian policemen with drink in order to give the remaining camp inmates an opportunity to flee to the nearby woods and join the partisans there. A German by the name of Selinger, the commandant of the labor camp at nearby Adampol, denounced him to the Gestapo for providing food to the partisans and hiding Jews in his house. Falkenberg, who strongly denied the charges, was subsequently incarcerated in the infamous concentration camp of Mauthausen until its liberation by the Allies. On October 7, 1969, Yad Vashem recognized Bernhard Falkenberg as Righteous Among the Nations.