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71st anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising

On the 71st anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, the director of the Museum Dr Piotr M.A. Cywiński paid a tribute to its heroes and victims - including thousands of residents of the capital deported by the Germans to Auschwitz. At exactly 17:00, the commencement of fighting buy the insurgents at the “W” hour, he laid a wreath at the Death Wall in the yard of Block 11.

The history of the Uprising is inextricably intertwined with the history of the German Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. 'The Warsaw Uprising is not only a great armed uprising but the largest insurgent uprising throughout World War II. The Uprising was also an ordeal for tens of thousands of families. For approximately 13 thousand inhabitants of Warsaw, the Uprising ended in Auschwitz,' said director Cywiński, who himself comes from Warsaw.

During and after the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, the Germans deported about 550 thousand residents of Warsaw and approximately 100 thousand people from the neighbouring areas of the city. They were moved to a specially prepared transit camp in Pruszków near Warsaw, called Durchgangslager 121. 55 thousand persons were transported to concentration camps.

In the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, the Germans imprisoned about 13 thousand of them, ranging from newborns to the elderly. That is over half of the total number of Poles deported to Auschwitz from all over the district of Warsaw from August 1940 to September 1944. About 400 people from the Pruszków transports lived to see the liberation of Auschwitz, including at least 125 children and adolescents.

The fate of the people deported to Auschwitz after the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising is described, among others in the online lesson “From insurgent Warsaw to Auschwitz”, as well as the memoirs by Bogdan Bartnikowski Childhood Behind Barbed Wire.