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From Zamość to Auschwitz
Today is the 64th anniversary of the arrival in Auschwitz of the first transport of prisoners from the Zamość region.
They arrived on December 13, 1942 from a transit camp in Zamość. The transport consisted of over 640 Poles. 14 of them managed to escape on the way to Auschwitz. By March 1943, a total of 1,301 Poles were sent to Auschwitz from the Zamość region.
The journey, under inhuman conditions, lasted over two days. The train cars were sealed shut and the people crowded in so tightly that no one could sit down. They did not receive anything to eat or drink.
This transport is connected with a shocking story, recounted in The Auschwitz Chronicle by the late Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum historian Danuta Czech. Because men were being separated from women on the ramp, the mothers of two boys aged 8 and 9 decided to try to pass them off as girls in order to stay together with them. However, the truth came out on December 17, and the boys, Tadzio Rycyk and Miecio Rycaj, were sent to the men's camp and murdered four days later by means of injections of phenol to the heart.
Only 129 of the 1,301 deportees to Auschwitz from the Zamość region survived the war. The fate of 272 of these people remains unknown.
