News
Online educational session: "The Apex of Crime: Deportations of Jews from Hungary to KL Auschwitz" – 20 June 2024
The International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust invites you to participate in the online educational session "The Apex of Crime: Deportations of Jews from Hungary to KL Auschwitz." The session will be held on the Zoom platform on 20 June 2024 and will be simultaneously translated into English.
During the session, the topic of the mass deportations and extermination of Hungarian Jews, which took place 80 years ago, will be discussed. During the main phase of the deportations to the German Nazi camp Auschwitz, approximately 420,000 Jews from Hungary were deported, of whom about 75% were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival and selection.
Program (time zone CEST)
16:00-16:05 | Session inauguration
16:05-17:30 | Deportations of Jews from Hungary to KL Auschwitz - Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz, Museum Research Center
17:45-18:30 | The Place Where You Are Standing… – Contemporary photos of places known from the Auschwitz Album - Paweł Sawicki, Deputy Press Spokesman of the Museum
18:30-19:15 | What Remains. About the looted property in the Museum Collections - Elżbieta Cajzer, Museum Collections.
Participation in the session is free of charge. Please register using the online form by 18 June 2024. After this date, you will receive an email with a link to participate in the meeting.
The first transports of Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz on 28 and 29 April 1944, from the Kistarca camp near Budapest and the city of Topolya in Vojvodina. They arrived at the so-called Altejudenrampe on 2 May. After selection, 486 men and 616 women were registered in the camp. The remaining 2,698 people were murdered in the gas chambers.
However, the camp authorities realized then that Auschwitz was not ready to receive the planned huge number of deportees. It was then decided to suspend transports until the completion of the construction of the railway ramp inside the Birkenau camp and the removal of other "technical" difficulties. It was then decided, among other things, to reactivate the provisional gas chamber, known as the "little white house," and to dig pits for burning corpses.
When the transports from April and a few smaller ones from the late summer and autumn of 1944 are added to the 420,000 Jews that arrived at Auschwitz during the main phase of deportation, then the total number of Jews deported from Hungary to Auschwitz was around 430,000. From the documents of the clothing warehouse in Birkenau, it is known that as a result of the selection of transports of Jews from Hungary, the SS sent some 52,000 men and – only presumably – a similar number of women to the camp. This means that directly after arrival at Auschwitz, 325,000 to 330,000 people, more than 75 percent of all deportees, were murdered in gas chambers.