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The Sixty-Second Anniversary of the First Transport of Polish Prisoners to Auschwitz

On June 14, 1940, the Nazis sent a group of 729 Polish men (including approximately 20 Jews) from the prison in Tarnów to the newly opened Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

The prisoners were mostly young: members of underground independence organizations, or soldiers from the September 1939 campaign who were arrested as they tried, by way of Hungary, to reach the Polish army that was being formed in France. When the train stopped in Cracow on the way from Tarnów to Oświęcim, the prisoners saw cheering Germans at the train station and heard the news that the Nazi army had taken Paris being broadcast over loudspeakers.

The Fall Gelb operation, aimed at defeating Paris and subduing Western Europe, had ended. In the afternoon, the train pulled up at a platform in Oświęcim near the site of the camp. The first prisoners of Auschwitz Concentration Camp were beaten and herded into a building formerly used by the Tobacco Monopoly, since the camp was not yet ready to accept transports. On orders from the occupation authorities, church bells were rung throughout the city at six o'clock that evening as an expression of joy at the taking of the French capital.

Thus began the operation of the camp that would claim one and a half million victims, mostly Jews—although there were also over seventy thousand Polish victims, over twenty thousand Roma ("Gypsies"), over ten thousand Soviet POWs, and thousands more victims from other ethnic groups.