Thanks to Reddit I have managed to further my digging into my family history - with specific reference to my maternal grandmother. She was born in Russia, identified as Ukrainian and in all documents prior to Australian citizenship stated her religion as orthodox, not jewish.
I've always known that she was in (at least 1) Labour camp which involved factory work. I have also always known she had a tattoo which was always meet with her killing the conversation (not in an angry way) saying "ït doesn't matter".
Until recently I thought everyone in the camps was tattooed but I've come to find out in was only done at Auschwitz. Is it possible that people were moved from there to other Labour camps? Where could I look? My nan once punched a guard for hassling someone else in the camp.
My documents and sleuthing have her arriving in Germany from the Ukraine in 1942 though not sure exactly where. The next location on paper is her being in Frankfurt am Main when liberated in 1945, where there was a camp named Walldorf and slave labour was also used to build the airport.
Thanks for reading!
This is certainly a conundrum, what a brave and strong person your Grandmother must be.
You are right about the tattoos, they only used them in Auschwitz and that was still on and off dependent on how many people had arrived at the camp and if they could process them all in that way. It was not uncommon for prisoners to be shipped to other camps out of the requirement for labour there or what appears to be at random thanks to the deeply inefficient and bureaucratic nature of the Nazi operation.
I think it is right to say she must have passed through Auschwitz and then sent to another camp. Do you know if she ever resided in Hungary at some point? It was a relatively safe haven compared to Ukraine. I ask as the biggest influx of people to Auschwitz were from Hungary in 1944. The camp leadership knew they had the capacity to murder large amounts but the disposable of bodies produced a backlog. This did lead to efforts to ship people out to labour camps elsewhere and the Walldorf camp, in particular, received many to work on the runway as you said.
There aren't many sources on this unfortunately but the camp website has some further information:
http://www.kz-walldorf.de/g2000_auschwitz.html (in German)
And some further primary sources here:
http://www.kz-walldorf.de/g1000_opfer.html
I had a read through Laurence Rees’ definitive book on Auschwitz but welcome any other redditor's sources that could give more light on this question.
http://kz-walldorf.de/g2000_auschwitz.html The concentration camp Walldorf got its own website - the German text under Auschwitz has some statements of survivors. It says most Hungarian prisoners from auschwitz were killed on arrival so your grandmother was very lucky indeed. http://kz-walldorf.de/links.html This site has links with more information maybe useful to you.