“Young and healthy people don't live longer than three months here. Priests one month, Jews two weeks. There is only one way out — through the crematorium chimneys.”
That
was the message delivered to the 728 prisoners who arrived in the first
mass transport to Auschwitz on June 14, 1940, as later recalled by
survivor Kazimierz Albi.
The
first group the Nazis sent to Auschwitz, which later became one of the
most notorious institutions of murder in human history, was made up of
Polish political prisoners. They arrived at the compound two years
before it became a camp for the extermination of Jews, but the message
delivered to that first group by a Nazi captain made clear that this was
never an ordinary prison.
The
Polish prisoners, who were transported by train from Tarnow, were
mostly Poles accused of belonging to resistance movements and included a
number of Jews. As they descended from the train that day, each was
assigned a prison number between 31 and 758. Prisoners 1 through 30,
common German criminals, had been sent to the camp a month earlier.
“My
brother was ahead of me. He got number 116; and Troop Captain
Stachowicz was given number 117. I got number 118. The list for our
transport started with Stanislav Ryniak, number 31, and ended with
Ignacy Plachta, number 758.,” Albi recalled of those first minutes in
the camp.
“After those formalities, the Kapos drove us... to the
roll-call ground, where we had to line up in 5 rows.”
For
the next two years, the Nazis continued sending Polish political
prisoners to the concentration camp at the intersection of the Vistula
and Sola rivers. In 1942, however, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime
devised the “Final Solution” to rid Europe of its Jews, a plan in which
Auschwitz would play a central role. On January 25 of that year,
Heinrich Himmler gave an order to camp authorities to prepare for the
arrival of 150,000 German Jews.
The
first transport composed of Jews arrived some three weeks later from
Bytom, a German-annexed area of Poland. That year, some 175,000 Jews
were brought to the extermination camp. In the coming months and years,
the deportations to Auschwitz increased in speed, frequency and size.
When
the Soviet Red Army finally arrived at Auschwitz to liberate it in
1945, one major-general described “the horrible villainies of the German
fiends in the camp Auschwitz, which surpass all the atrocities known to
us.” But even after its liberation, the full scope of the atrocities
the Nazis carried out took months and years to be told.
By
the end of World War Two, when the camp was liberated, 1.1 million Jews
had been sent to Auschwitz; 90 percent of them were exterminated by the
genocidal Nazi killing machine established and first populated five
years earlier. Over 100,000 non-Jews were also murdered within the
confines of the deadliest concentration camp. Of the original 728 Polish
political prisoners brought to Auschwitz, some 200 ultimately survived
the war.
In
the decades since the end of the Holocaust, Auschwitz has become one of
the most notorious symbols of the Nazis’ unparalleled genocide of the
Jews and attempted liquidation of Gypsies, homosexuals and others. But
as evidenced by the first group of prisoners to arrive in the death
camp, Jews and other minorities were not the only ones to suffer the
inhuman treatment and murderous fate at Auschwitz. Although their
numbers were miniscule in comparison to the Jews gassed and cremated in
the camp, political prisoners, prisoners of war and common criminals
shared the same fate.
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