Preserving the shoes of Stutthof

Leather footwear from Nazi concentration camps ended up at the Baltic coast base, and campaigners want them to be salvaged

- Kate Connolly

At the foot of a pine tree, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski bent to touch the black, moist shapes nestling amid the fungi and leaf mulch. "I've been monitoring this area now since 2015, and always hope I won't stumble upon anything any more and that one day the entire area will have been cleared," he said. This, however, was not that day.

The 39-year-old poet, scholar and rock musician was walking in the forest just metres from the perimeter fence of what was once the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp in the Germanannexed territory of Poland, and is now a memorial site in Sztutowo, a village 38km east of Gdańsk on the Baltic coast.

What he was looking for - and what, over the course of two hours in midMarch, he found - are shoes: hundreds of soles, large and broad, small and narrow, bordered with cobblers' tack holes; soft, thin fragments of leather upper parts, their decorative perforations and colours clearly visible.

Every time he came here, he said, he was struck "by the softness of the ground, by the entire surface littered with strange mounds and elevations. You feel that you're not walking on compacted earth but on hundreds of thousands of shoes."

Stutthof, which was built by the Nazi regime to persecute Polish political prisoners and later became an integral part of the machinery to exterminate European Jews, eventually assumed a role as leather repair collection point for all of Nazi Germany's concentration camps. The shoes transported there after their wearers had been sent to their deaths - were recycled into leather goods such as belts, rucksacks and holsters.