News
On the Anniversary of the First Transport
The Tarnów branch of the Auschwitz Preservation Society is preparing a rich commemorative program to mark this painful date.
The last meeting of the Society approved the schedule, and the organizers count on numerous Tarnów residents joining former prisoners in the main ceremonies on June 13.
After opening a stamp exhibition at the Tarnovia Hotel that day, the ceremonies shift to ulica Urszulańska for the laying of flowers at the site of Gestapo torture headquarters, and then to ulica Konarskiego for the placing of floral tributes at the wall of the prison. Tarnów City Council opens a special commemorative session at 10 AM, followed by a march along ulica Walowa to the monument to the first transport and the paying of tribute to prisoners murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. A new commemorative tablet will be unveiled at 1:00 PM at the train station, from where the prisoners will travel by rail to a memorial mass and reunion at Złota. They will return to the Tarnovia Hotel in the evening and then, the next morning, depart on a special train for Oświęcim and a second day of commemoration.
The ceremonies in Tarnów will be accompanied by several exhibitions, one of which will be held outdoors on ul. Krakowska and at the train station. A book containing the firsthand reminiscences of prisoner no. 213, Eugeniusz Niedojadło, will be launched. Earlier, on June 7, former Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners will hold a meeting with school students and open an exhibition titled As Long As We Are Alive.
The First Transport of Prisoners to Auschwitz in Brief
The first transport of political prisoners to the Auschwitz concentration camp arrived from Tarnów on June 14, 1940. The vast majority of them were non-Jewish Poles, but there were also some Jews among them.
Upon arrival in Auschwitz, the prisoners were tattooed with the numbers from 31 to 758. Stanisław Ryniak obtained the lowest number, 31. Lower numbers had been assigned to German common criminals brought to Auschwitz from the camp at Sachsenhausen to form the cadre of the camp staff.
Lagerfuehrer (camp director) Karl Fritzsch greeted the prisoners from the Tarnów transport with the words: “You have not come to a sanatorium, but rather to a German concentration camp, from which the only way out is through the chimney. If anybody doesn’t like it, you can go throw yourself on the barbed wire right now. If there are any Jews in this transport, they have the right to live not longer than two weeks, priests a month, and the rest—three months.”
The prisoners were placed in the cellars of the pre-war Tobacco Monopoly building, since the camp blocks were not yet ready.
239 of the prisoners on the first transport survived the war. About 40 of them are still alive. The others perished in Auschwitz, or met some unknown fate.
Publication to Mark the Occasion
The Christian Association of Auschwitz Families (CAAF) will mark the occasion by issuing a special publication about the history of the first transport of Poles to the Auschwitz German concentration camp.
The book will present the story of the first transport in the prisoners’ own words, beginning from their lives before the war, through their role in combat against the German invaders in September 1939, their arrest, and their imprisonment in Auschwitz.
