News
From Warsaw to Auschwitz
August 12-13 marked the 61st anniversary of the deportation to the Auschwitz Nazi camp of the most numerous group of Warsaw residents as the uprising engulfed the Polish capital. Almost 6,000 people were deported on these two days.
After the start of the armed uprising in Warsaw on August 12-13, the Germans deported a total of about 13,000 Warsaw residents to Auschwitz by way of the transit camp in Pruszków. They were imprisoned in Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
The deportees included civil servants, academics, artists, physicians, merchants, and workers. Infants only a few weeks old and elderly people in their nineties found themselves in Birkenau. There were also isolated cases in which the deportees were of non-Polish ethnicity, including Jews who had been in hiding on “Aryan papers.”
The most numerous transports reached Auschwitz on August 12-13. There were almost a thousand children and young people among the almost 6,000 deportees. The next transport from Pruszków reached Auschwitz on September 4, carrying 3,087 people. Two subsequent transports on September 13 and 17 carried almost 4,000 people to Auschwitz.
The majority of “Warsaw Transport” prisoners were transferred to camps in the depths of Germany after several weeks or months, and compelled to labor in the armaments industry. The Germans were beginning to evacuate Auschwitz. At least 602 women and children, including some born in Auschwitz, were sent to camps in Berlin in five transports in January 1945. Some of them died during the “Death March,” while others lived to be liberated at camps in the depths of the Reich.
At least 298 people from Warsaw—men, women, and children—were liberated in Auschwitz.
