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Original camp secret messages enriched museum Archives
53 original camp secret messages went to the Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Among them are copies of the camp's morgue books, or lists of names of those who were murdered in gas chambers. A few secret letters are materials previously unknown to historians of the Museum.
All the messages were discovered in a kitchen shaft, where they had been hidden. “Presumably all illegal camp correspondence was through PPS channels smuggled out of the camp to Kraków. There, the secret messages were photographed, and then, which appears logical from the perspective of the underground, were tucked, but so as to be readily available,” said the head of the Research Department of the Museum, Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz.
9 of the letters are completely new documents. Here you can find the underground pseudonyms of Jozef Cyrankiewicz, who first became involved in clandestine activity of prisoners associated with PPS in May 1943 and who was one of the initiators of the so-called Kampfgruppe Auschwitz, and in the fall of 1944, by decision of the commander of the Silesian Army District, he was supposed to take over military leadership of the Council of the Military Camp, an organisation created following an agreement between the Kampfgruppe and a military organisation associated with the AK.
The “Factory of the Dead” is a highly profitable enterprise. Several hundredweights of gold and jewels were carried away, to which in fact I have no detailed data. The barracks at «efekta» [camp's warehouses] are filled with the most expensive furs, the best dress materials, blankets, underwear, canned goods, wine, etc., whereas the cost of the «exit through the chimney» never exceeds 3-4 RM [Reich's Mark], because that is how much coke, needed to incinerate one corpse, cost – this is raw data that regard the greatest crime yet committed by man", we can read in one of the letters.
Another reads: "There is a group of Russians who wants to escape. What possibilities are there to support them, provide them contact with the partisans, or give them the possibility to establish local partisan groups? If the latter would be possible, then the other Russians could also follow the same path [...] Do you think it as an appropriate and desired action?”.
“These messages are mostly about the camp's underground activities, such as an appeal to send larger quantities of medicines, requests for a meeting with other organisations of the resistance movements, as well as a brief mention of the most important events in the camp, including estimates of the number of victims along with information about the mass extermination in Auschwitz. These are not are materials that can drastically change our knowledge of the resistance movement in the camp, but each of the original secret letters is really unique, because very few of such documents have been preserved,” said Piotr Setkiewicz.
In addition to the new documents in the acquired collection, there are also original secret letters, photocopies of which were already present in the museum archives. They were transmitted after the war by the team investigating the crimes committed at Auschwitz. According to Peter Setkiewicz, the most important among them is a copy of the morgue books. “In the museum, there is indeed the German original, but the prisoners, at risk to their own lives, copied down information about which of the prisoners were killed by phenol injections. In fact, this is the only document that allows you to state that the prisoners did not die a natural death, but were killed in blocks of 20 intracardial injections,” said Setkiewicz.
Beside copies of the morgue books, also original secret message came to the Museum in which the author writes that in September 1943, a transport brought women and children from Bydgoszcz to the camp. Everyone from the transport was murdered in the camp, but some time later, the commandant received information that they should be released. Among the materials can also be found references to the names of gassed Jewish women deported from the Theresienstadt ghetto, as well as several fragments of an original document concerning the execution of a Soviet prisoner of war.
