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In the Memory of the Warsaw Uprising
69 years ago, on 1 August 1944, the Warsaw Uprising began. On the anniversary of this event, promptly at 17.00 – the commencement of fighting by the insurgents at the "W" hour – the director of the Museum, Dr Piotr M.A. Cywiński, laid a wreath at the Death Wall and paid tribute to the heroes and victims of the Uprising — including the thousands of residents of the capital deported to Auschwitz.
The history of the Uprising is inextricably intertwined with the history of the former German Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. During and after the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, as a result of repressive actions, the Germans deported more than half a million inhabitants from Warsaw. Nearly 13,000 people, including infants, children and elderly people, were sentenced by the Nazis in KL Auschwitz.
Next year's celebration of the annual even, the 70th Anniversary of the Uprising, will include a number of new proposals for education, exhibitions and publications related to the fate of the Warsaw residents deported to Auschwitz.;
Transports of Poles from Warsaw to Auschwitz after the outbreak of the Uprising
After the outbreak of the armed Uprising in Warsaw, nearly 13 thousand Warsaw residents, including men, women and children, were arrested and deported through the transit camp in Pruszków to Auschwitz in August and September 1944. They were imprisoned within the area of Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
These included people from different social backgrounds, different professions (government officials, scientists, artists, doctors, merchants, labourers), different physical conditions (the wounded, sick, disabled, pregnant women), those of all ages — children from several weeks old to infants and even those above eighty-six years of age. In a few cases, there were also people of other nationalities, including the Jews hiding on the Aryan papers.
The largest transports arrived in Auschwitz on 12 and 13August, totalling almost six thousand people (including approx. four thousand females and two thousand males, and among them, more than one thousand children and young people of both sexes).
On 4 September, another transport from Pruszków brought 3,087 men, women and children to Auschwitz. In two transports on 13 and 17 September, nearly four thousand men and boys, along with three women, were transported. Most of these people were transferred after several weeks or months, as part of the preliminary evacuation of Auschwitz, to the camps deep within the Third Reich to work in the armaments industry. Many died in these camps.
In January 1945, five transports with at least 602 women and children (including children born in the camp) were sent to camps in Berlin. Some prisoners from the above-mentioned Warsaw transports were evacuated in January 1945 from the camp. Some died in the "death marches," and others survived until liberation in other camps within the Reich. At least 298 inhabitants of Warsaw (men, women and children) lived to see the liberation of KL Auschwitz.
