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80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising. Podcast about the Poles deported to Auschwitz during the uprising.

80 years ago, on August 1, 1944, an armed uprising erupted in Warsaw. It lasted 63 days. Its history is inextricably linked with the history of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz, as reminded by a podcast published on this occasion from the series "On Auschwitz".

Precisely at 5:00 PM, the "W" hour – when the battles in Warsaw began eight decades ago – the director of the Museum, Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, paid tribute to nearly 13,000 residents of the capital who were deported by the Germans to the Auschwitz camp during the Uprising. He laid a wreath at the Death Wall in the courtyard of Block 11 at the former Auschwitz I camp.

"The Warsaw Uprising was the largest armed insurrection in the history of World War II. But it was also a story paid for with unspeakable losses among the civilian population of Warsaw. The Germans murdered about 180,000 civilian residents of the city. And thousands more civilians were deported to concentration camps," said director Cywiński.

In the "On Auschwitz" podcast, Dr. Wanda Witek-Malicka from the Museum's Research Center discusses the fates of nearly 13,000 Warsaw residents deported to Auschwitz, including about 1,400 children.

‘Here these children were already condemned to fend for themselves in this reality. We know from the accounts of the Survivors themselves, including those children, that there were cases where siblings arrived at the camp, the older with the younger. And these tiny children were from that moment on solely under the care of their older sisters, and these girls, sometimes teenagers, had to look after two- or three-year-olds in the camp reality, which was extremely difficult and essentially this care could only amount to concern but was not able to protect these children from the harsh reality of the camp,’ said Wanda Malicka-Witek.

She also mentions an extremely painful moment for the Survivors returning to the city: ‘These people left Warsaw, which despite everything was still a city. Coming back, they suddenly faced a sea of ruins. One of the prisoners describes that walking just a few hundred meters took her several hours, as she had to make her way through the rubble to her home, not knowing if that home still existed.’

‘The very moment of encountering the image of Warsaw they found upon return was traumatic for them. The fear of what their home looked like, or indeed if they still had anything to return to. Most of them did not find their homes. Many of them, when they came to the place where they lived before the war or before the outbreak of the uprising, found only ruins,’ said Dr. Witek-Malicka.

The fate of those deported to Auschwitz after the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising is described in a special exhibition prepared by the Museum in the Google Cultural Institute and the 10th volume of the educational series - Voices of Memory.

The Museum has also prepared a unique online lesson devoted to the transports from insurgent Warsaw to Auschwitz.

Transports of Poles from Warsaw to KL Auschwitz after the outbreak of the Uprising

Following the outbreak of the armed uprising in Warsaw, approximately 13,000 Warsaw residents: men, women, and children, were arrested and deported to KL Auschwitz via the Pruszków transit camp in August and September 1944. They were imprisoned in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp.

The deportees were people from diverse social backgrounds, professions (such as government officials, scientists, artists, doctors, merchants, and workers), various physical conditions (injured, sick, disabled, and pregnant women), and ages ranging from infants few weeks old to individuals over eighty-six years old. In certain instances, they were individuals of diverse nationalities, including Jews concealing their identity with so-called Aryan papers.

The largest group to arrive at Auschwitz were the transports of 12 and 13 August, totalling nearly 6,000 people (including some 4,000 women and 2,000 men, and among them, over 1,000 children and young people of both genders).

A subsequent transport of 3,087 men, women, and children was sent from Pruszków to Auschwitz on September 4. Two further transports arrived on13 and 17 of September, bringing with them nearly four thousand men and three women. As part of the initial stages of the preliminary evacuation of Auschwitz, the majority of the people from these transports were sent within a few or several weeks to camps in the depths of the Third Reich and put to work in the armament industry. Many died in these camps.

In January 1945, at least 602 women with children (including children born in the camp) were deported to the camps in Berlin in five transports. Some prisoners from the Warsaw transports were evacuated from the camp in January 1945. Some died during the “death marches”, while others persevered until their liberation from camps within the depths of the Reich. At least 400 people from the Pruszków transports, including some 125 children and juveniles, lived to see liberation.