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June 14 — National Remembrance Day
In the name of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the head of the Research Department, Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz, laid a wreath at the Death Wall to mark the National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Nazi Concentration Camps. On this day seventy years ago, the Nazi Germans deported 728 Polish political prisoners from the prison in Tarnów to the newly founded Auschwitz camp.
With former prisoners in attendance, the bishop of the Bielsko-Żywiec diocese, Tadeusz Rakoczy, said mass for the intention of the victims of the Nazi German camps outside Block 11 at the Auschwitz site. He referred to the day’s anniversary in his homily, saying that “this was the tragic beginning of the Nazi-planned decisive phase of the extermination of some of the world’s peoples—above all the Jews, Poles, and Roma. A monstrous mechanism of hatred and human misfortune was set in motion. The most terrifying page in human history was turned.”
“We are gathered together today in this place, at this ‘Calvary of our times,’ seventy years after the day when the first person was murdered here, to pay tribute to all of our brothers and sisters who were brought here in inhuman conditions. They were torn away from their loved ones by force. They experienced being stripped naked and humiliated. They suffered and starved. Tormented and tortured, they were killed and burned in the name of a depraved ideology of hatred and contempt for humanity [...] This place imposes an obligation on all of us, on all of Europe and the world. And this is an obligation to love, remember, and bear witness to the Holocaust. In the name of this, we are all present here today,” said Bishop Rakoczy.
Commenting on the anniversary of June 14, the historian Piotr Setkiewicz remarked that “the first transport of 728 Polish political prisoners arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp 70 years ago. Several days later, there was a transport from the prison in Wiśnicz Nowy, followed by a transport from Silesia and the large Warsaw transports. Despite the exceptionally high death rate in the camp and despite all the obstacles, many of the prisoners transported in that first phase of the existence of Auschwitz managed to survive until the evacuation of the camp in January 1945,” he said.
“In the popular mind, the Auschwitz camp is perceived as the site of the Holocaust of the Jews. However, it is worth noting that, in its first years, it served above all as a place for the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia,” Setkiewicz noted.
To mark Remembrance Day, the Museum announced that work was underway on a new Polish exhibition devoted to the fate of approximately 450,000 Polish citizens—Poles and Polish Jews—who were deported to Auschwitz. It will be located in block 15 on the grounds of Auschwitz I.
Learn more about the new exhibition devoted to Polish citizens in Auschwitz
June 14, 1940
A transport of 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnów arrived in Auschwitz on June 14, 1940. Among them were veterans of the September 1939 campaign, members of underground independence groups, high-school and university students, and a small group of Polish Jews. They received numbers 31 to 758 and were housed for the quarantine period in the old Polish Tobacco Monopoly building, adjacent to the present-day grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (the first camp numbers were given to German criminal prisoners who had arrived earlier to take up functionary or trusty posts). Out of the 728 prisoners who arrived at Auschwitz on June 14, 1940, 298 survived the war and 272 died; the fate of 158 is unknown.
Learn more about Poles in Auschwitz
