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70th anniversary of extermination of Jews from Hungary. Living community of memory on-line.
The story of the transports of Jews deported from Hungary to the Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz 70 years ago, in summer 1944, will be available to follow at the Auschwitz Memorial Facebook page, as well as through other social media of the Museum.
"First of all, we will post reminders of basic facts about specific transports. We also intend to use short fragments of testimonies given by survivors who witnessed those events as well as historical photographs and documents, so that the facts and numbers are placed in the context of dramatic human experiences, emotions and stories," said Paweł Sawicki, co-ordinator of the Museum’s social media activity in the Museum Press Office.
"We invite everyone to participate and create this special project with us on Facebook - for example, by commenting or sharing our posts and helping us reach the biggest number of people. Starting at the end of April, the information will be posted regularly, until the middle of July. We intend for it to become a place of communal and living memory,” added Sawicki.
Thanks to social media, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum reaches over 100,000 people from all over the world every day. The official page of the Auschwitz Memorial on Facebook, created a few years ago, is followed by over 108,000 people, but the Museum is now also active on Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
According to Dr. Piotr M.A. Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz Museum, such methods of commemoration demonstrate the educational potential of skilfully-used social media. "Our mission of preserving memory does not stop at the barbed wire surrounding the camp. We want to reach everyone, no matter where they live, and enable them to spend the coming weeks in the spirit of commemoration of the darkest time of the Auschwitz-Birkenau history," he said.
"The events of summer 1944 are significant not only historically but also on an emotional level. Among over 430,000 deported, there was a nine-year-old boy whose gaze, captured on the ramp in Birkenau, has become a symbol of the Auschwitz Memorial Site today," Cywiński added.
Additionally, in the beginning of June, an open online lesson prepared by Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz, Head of the Research Centre of the Museum, will be published at www.auschwitz.org. The lesson will be devoted to the extermination of Jews from Hungary in the Auschwitz camp, but it will also provide broader information on the history of the Jewish community that inhabited Hungary before World War Two and in the period preceding the deportations.
The first transports of Hungarian Jews were directed to Auschwitz on 28th and 29th April 1944 from Kistarcsa camp, near Budapest, and from the town of Bačka Topola in Vojvodina. They arrived at the so-called Altejudenrampe on 2nd May. After the selection, 486 men and 616 women were registered in the camp. The rest - 2,698 people - were murdered in the gas chambers.
"Then, the camp administration learned that Auschwitz was not ready to accept the planned huge deportations. They decided to stop transports until the construction of a railway ramp inside the Birkenau camp was completed and other ‘technical’ difficulties were solved. Then they decided, among other things, to re-open a provisional gas chamber, the so-called "little white house", and to dig pits for burning of bodies," explains Piotr Setkiewicz.
The main phase of deportations of Jews from Hungary began on 14th May and lasted until 9th July 1944. During this period, 142 trains arrived in Auschwitz, transporting about 420,000 people.
"If we add to this number the transports from April and a few smaller from autumn 1944, the total number of the deported from Hungary amounts to about 430,000. The documents from the clothing storage in Birkenau inform us that after the selection of the transports of Jews from Hungary, SS men registered 52,000 men in the camp and a similar number of women - although this can only be assumed. It means that, directly after having come to Auschwitz, 325-330,000 people, over 75% of the deported, were murdered in the gas chambers," Setkiewicz emphasised.
The 70th anniversary of the deportations of Jews from Hungary is one of a few important anniversaries this year: 2014 also marks the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the so-called Zigeunerlager at Birkenau; the 70th anniversary of the deportation of almost 13,000 Poles arrested during the Warsaw Uprising to Auschwitz, the 70th anniversary of the extermination of Jews from the liquidated ghetto in Łódź in the camp; and the 70th anniversary of the Sonderkommando prisoners’ revolt at Auschwitz. On 27th January 2015, 70 years will have passed since the liberation of the Auschwitz camp.
