News
“Deportations of Jews from Slovakia to Auschwitz.” New lesson and podcast now available
The deportations of Jews from Slovakia to the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz are the focus of a new online lesson and an episode of the "On Auschwitz" podcast series, prepared by the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. The author of the lesson and the guest featured in the podcast is Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz, Head of the Research Center at the Auschwitz Museum.
PODCAST (YouTube)
PODCAST (Spotify)
“Among the various ethnic groups deported from German-occupied Europe to Auschwitz, the fate of the Slovak Jews had a particular significance. This is because they were sent to the camp at a time when it was undergoing a fundamental transformation: from a concentration camp where prisoners were gradually exterminated through hard labour and hunger to an extermination centre where tens and even thousands of people were murdered in gas chambers,” we read in the introduction to the lesson.
The first transport, designated Da 66, of 999 Jewish women from Slovakia, left Poprad on the night of 25/26 March 1942. It reached Auschwitz in the early morning and was received at the railway station’s siding. The moment of their arrival was described by Margita Götzova:
‘In the morning, before our arrival, we saw from the freight car figures in striped uniforms, with shaven heads. They looked like clowns. When the train stopped at Oświęcim [Auschwitz] Station, the freight car door was opened and we heard shouting: “Los! Los!” Having to leave the car as fast as possible, we were marched in an unknown direction. We reached a gate with an inscription Arbeit macht frei. This meant nothing to me, but the behaviour of the uniformed Germans suggested to us that we had been tricked, that we were in a concentration camp.’
The Slovak Jews “were also the first on whom the German Nazis tested selection procedures, not only immediately after arrival in the camp at the Alte Judenrampe, but also later in the hospital barracks, in so-called secondary selections, after which the chosen prisoners were murdered in the gas chambers. Mortality in this ethnic group, even by Auschwitz standards, was exceptionally high. Of the nearly three and a half thousand men registered in the camp during the first deportation wave of April 1942, four months later, barely 6% were still alive,” the lesson continues.
The lesson is divided into several chapters. It discusses the situation in Slovakia just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the persecution of Jews, the phase of preparations for deportations, as well as the deportation of the first transport of Jewish women from Slovakia to Auschwitz. This transport was the first organized transport of Jews to the camp and the second transport of women. The lesson also examines the situation of male prisoners and the conditions of existence in the camp.
An important event in the history of Auschwitz was the escape of three Slovak Jews. “On 7 April 1944, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, and on 27 May Arnošt Rosin, together with the Polish Jew Czesław Mordowicz, managed to escape from Birkenau and cross the border to Slovakia. There, they submitted extensive testimonies concerning their time in the camp and warned against the impending mass slaughter of the Jews from Hungary.
These accounts, in the form of reports, were passed on to Switzerland and from there reached the press; they also became the subject of numerous interventions by Jewish activists with political leaders in the Allied countries. As a result of mounting protests from all sides, the Regent Miklós Horthy halted the deportations in early July, which contributed to saving at least some of the Hungarian, mainly Budapest, Jews,” the lesson notes.
In total, during the Second World War, two-thirds of the approximately 90,000 Slovak Jews were killed. About 27,000 of them were deported to Auschwitz. Only a small proportion of those who survived were former concentration camp prisoners who returned to their homes after the war.
The lesson and the podcast are available in both Polish and English.
