News
First, There Were the Poles
Ceremonies in Oświęcim mark the 64th anniversary of the deportation to Auschwitz of the first transport of Polish political prisoners.
“I happen to have lived in the West for many years. Unfortunately, I cannot help saying—and in this I am expressing the views of other surviving fellow prisoners—that the role of the Poles and their martyrdom is usually ignored or, at best, marginalized,” noted Janusz Młynarski, former Auschwitz prisoner no. 355, during yesterday’s observances in Oświęcim of the 64th anniversary of the deportation to Auschwitz of the first transport of Polish political prisoners.
On June 14, 1940, the Nazis deported 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnów to the newly opened Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Most of them were young members of independence organizations or veterans of the September 1939 campaign. They were beaten as they were herded into subterranean rooms, since the camp was not yet ready to receive prisoners. For the first several years, Auschwitz was designated mainly for Poles. Some 150,000 of them arrived here, and nearly half of them died here. One of the organizations that held the ceremony, the Christian Association of Auschwitz Families, stated that the site is the largest known Polish cemetery from the Second World War period. “Poland can never forget this, and Europe must learn about it,” former prisoners said in Oświęcim yesterday.
The two-day commemorations began the previous day in Tarnów. In the name of the mayors and headmen of Tarnów and Oświęcim, Tarnów mayor Mieczysław Bień, standing at the foot of the Monument to the First Transport, read out an appeal for June 14 to be named Memorial Day to Polish Victims of the Nazi Concentration Camps, and January 27 Holocaust Memorial Day. Oświęcim mayor Janusz Marszałek read out the same appeal yesterday in Oświęcim, after which the proposal was sent to Polish Republic President Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Sejm [parliament] speaker Józef Oleksy.
The observances in Oświęcim began with mass at Divine Mercy church for the intention of the camp’s victims and former prisoners. Afterwards, the attendees marched to the Death Wall, led by the Brzeszcze Coal Mine Orchestra (the same orchestra played at the mass burial of Auschwitz victims in February 1945). A roll call of the fallen was read out. (…)
Flowers and wreaths were also laid at the building where the prisoners in the first transport were housed. (…). Józef Kała, headman of Oświęcim, unveiled a memorial tablet.
Janusz Młynarski, prisoner no. 355, addressed the present and future generations. “Polish prisoners made up 37% of all those registered in the camp,” he said. “Our compatriots died in every corner of the camp. Poles were the most active members of the resistance movement. We were the powerless eyewitnesses to the Holocaust—the murder of the Jewish people—and we witnessed the killing of the Gypsies and the Soviet POWs. Back then, we all had a single enemy: Nazism. It is our wish that, when Auschwitz is being talked about or taught about, none of the victims of this anus mundi, to use the definition by an SS physician, is forgotten.”
