Forgotten Broumov: The Place Where Thousands of Russian Prisoners of War Found Their Death

During the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian army built a huge and completely isolated prisoner-of-war camp here. It was not some small temporary collection point. More than 30,000 prisoners of war passed through this place.

Most of them were soldiers of Tsarist Russia, but fate also brought Serbs, Italians and Romanians here. These were men who had been captured on distant battlefields and deported deep into the interior of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Life Behind Barbed Wire: Hunger, Cold and a Typhus Epidemic

When I was studying old records about the camp, I realized how much suffering was hidden behind those numbers.

The camp in Martínkovice was basically a small town made of wooden barracks, where people lived in terrible conditions. Winters in the Broumov region can be harsh, food was critically scarce because of the war, and the men were already weakened by hard labour in nearby quarries and fields.

They had almost no chance against the worst enemy of all — disease.

A devastating epidemic of typhus soon broke out in the camp. In the overcrowded wooden barracks, the infection spread incredibly quickly. Dozens of men died every day.

Hungry, sick and freezing, soldiers were dying thousands of kilometres away from their homes.

Today, more than 2,600 Russian, Serbian, Italian and Romanian soldiers are buried in the local military cemetery. Some lie in mass graves, others in individual graves, hidden from the eyes of the world beneath the grass of the Broumov meadows.

A Russian Mausoleum in the Middle of the Czech Countryside

The most interesting feature of the entire site is the beautiful stone memorial that stands here. In the past, the Russian side had it partially restored in order to honour the memory of their fallen ancestors.

When you stand in front of this building in the middle of the Czech countryside, the impression is incredibly powerful.

For me, it is almost impossible to understand how short human memory can be.

For an ordinary Czech tourist, this place is practically unknown. People drive through the region, heading towards the Adršpach rocks, buying souvenirs and enjoying the scenery. Almost nobody knows about the enormous tragedy that happened just a short distance away.

The cemetery lies away from the main roads, surrounded by trees, and is visited mainly by historians and a small number of people interested in forgotten places.

When you find yourself alone at the Martínkovice cemetery, the atmosphere hits you immediately.

There is no traffic noise. No applause. No tourist signs telling you what to look at.

There are only hundreds of names carved into stone, many of them distorted by the Austro-Hungarian administration of the time, which struggled to deal with Russian Cyrillic names.

These men did not come to our lands as enemies who had come to fight us.

They were brought here as prisoners of war, as human labour, and many of them took their final breath here in terrible pain.

The world has changed enormously since then, but their home among these fields remains as a reminder.

A place that was almost forgotten deserves to be remembered.

Because forgetting these people means allowing them to die a second time.

Did you know that there are similar hidden and forgotten cemeteries from the World Wars in your region or somewhere near you?

Why do you think we tend to forget places that are not on the main tourist maps, even when they hide such enormous human tragedies?

Sources

These are the sources I used when writing this article:

• National Heritage Institute of the Czech Republic (Památkový katalog): Military Cemetery of Prisoners of War from the First World War in Martínkovice — an official state record of the protected cultural monument, including descriptions of the mass graves and the Russian Orthodox chapel (mausoleum).

• Military History Institute Prague (VHÚ): War Graves Register — Martínkovice — military records documenting the identities and number of more than 2,600 Russian, Serbian, Italian and Romanian soldiers buried at the site.

• Broumov Municipal Museum (Historical Archive): Broumov–Martínkovice Prisoner-of-War Camp, 1915–1918 — historical photographs, eyewitness accounts and records concerning the typhus epidemic in the wooden barracks of the camp, through which more than 30,000 prisoners passed.

I’m sorry for any mistakes in my English. I’m using this way of writing to improve my English, so please be patient with me and thank you for your understanding.