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The Warsaw Uprising and Deportation from Warsaw to Auschwitz
At 5:00 p.m. on August 1, precisely 63 years after the start of the Warsaw Uprising, Museum Director Piotr M.A. Cywiński and accompanying persons placed wreaths at the Death Wall in commemoration of this tragic event.
In their punitive response to the Uprising, the Germans deported some 13 thousand Warsaw residents to Auschwitz, including infants, children, and the elderly. Approximately 300 men, women, and children from Warsaw were still in Auschwitz at the time of liberation.
The memory of these events is reflected in numerous Museum publications, and is a permanent concern of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust.
The Center offers, for both teachers and interested students, a thematic unit titled The Exodus of the Civilian Population from the Warsaw Uprising from the Perspective of the Transports Sent to Auschwitz.
In April 2007, the Museum published a new, expanded edition of the frequently reprinted collection of stories about children in Auschwitz titled Dzieciństwo w pasiakach [Childhood in a striped camp uniform]. This is one of the most moving documents of the tragic fate of Auschwitz prisoners, and a shocking image of the camp as seen through the eyes of children. Its author, Bogdan Bartnikowski, fought in the Uprising at the age of 12 as a courier in the Ochota district. He and his mother were deported to Auschwitz on August 12, 1944.
Several years earlier, in 2000, the Museum published the monumental Księga Pamięci. Transporty Polaków z Warszawy do KL Auschwitz 1940-1944 [Memorial Book: Transports of Poles from Warsaw to Auschwitz, 1940-1944], dedicated to the Poles deported to Auschwitz from the so-called “Warsaw District.” It contains all the names known to historians of Warsaw residents sent to Auschwitz in connection with the Uprising.
Deportation from Warsaw to Auschwitz
After the outbreak of the Uprising, the Germans deported a total of approximately 13 thousand Warsaw residents to Auschwitz, by way of the transit camp in Pruszków. The largest contingent, nearly 6 thousand people, including children and youths, arrived in Auschwitz on August 12 and 13, 1944. Over 3 thousand more people were deported on September 4. The next two transports, on September 13 and 17, included almost 4 thousand people.
Infants and the elderly alike arrived in Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Those imprisoned included people of other nationalities as well, some of whom were Jews who had been in hiding on “Aryan papers.”
The majority of prisoners from the “Warsaw transports” were transferred at some later date to camps in the Third Reich, and put to work in the armaments industry. At least 600 women from Warsaw and children, including children born in the camp, were transferred to camps in Berlin in January 1945.
Some Warsaw residents died during the Death Marches; others lived to be liberated at camps in the depths of the Reich. At least 298 men, women, and children from Warsaw were liberated in Auschwitz.
