What happened
Kłomino was founded in the 1930s as a German base serving a Wehrmacht training ground. During the war it held a prisoner-of-war camp – in 1939 thousands of Polish prisoners and civilians were held here, and from 1940 the Oflag II D Gross-Born. After 1945 the area was taken over by the Soviet Army. The Russians called it Grodek. Fifty German-era buildings were demolished to salvage bricks for building the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, and blocks of flats, a medical post, shops and a cinema went up. At its peak several thousand people lived here. In 1992 the last soldiers left, and a year later the town was handed over to the Polish authorities. Unlike neighbouring Borne Sulinowo, Kłomino was never resettled. Empty blocks with smashed windows, overgrown streets and a silence broken only by the rustle of the forest have earned it the name of Poland's ghost town.
Witnesses
A handful of residents, tourists and urban explorers; the settlement's history has been described by RMF FM and “National Geographic”, among others.
Explanations and hypotheses
Kłomino is not haunted – its eeriness has simple causes. After the troops left, the settlement was cut off from the world and its infrastructure worn out. The commune tried to sell it as a whole for 2 million złoty, but no buyer came forward; an unfinished boiler house and sewage plant failed to attract residents. Since 2008 most of the blocks have been demolished, and according to 2012 figures only a dozen or so people remained. The place is still a destination for urban explorers and Cold War history enthusiasts.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
Sources
- The Guardian – Poles transform Soviet camps into capitalist beacons (2000)
- Rajmund Wełnic, Było sobie miasto. Niemieckie, ruskie, polskie. A teraz go nie ma („Głos Koszaliński”, 2022)
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