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Triubute to the Warsaw Uprising
68 years ago, on August 1, 1944, the Warsaw Uprising broke out. On the anniversary of this event, punctually at 5 p.m. — at the W-Hour that begun the Warsaw Uprising — Museum Director, Dr. Piotr M.A. Cywiński, who is from Warsaw, paid tribute to the participants and victims of the Uprising. When the sirens sounded, he placed a wreath at the Death Wall in the former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.
During the Warsaw Uprising and after its suppression, the Germans deported from Warsaw about 550 thousand of its inhabitants and about 100 thousand people from the surrounding areas of the city. They were moved to a specially created for this purpose temporary camp in Pruszków near Warsaw, Durchgangslager 121. 55 thousand people were deported to concentration camps. About 13 thousand of them were placed in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, including infants, children, and elderly people.
The memory of these events have been recorded in many Museum’s publications, e.g. in the Memorial Book. Transports of Poles from Warsaw to KL Auschwitz 1940-1944. 5 years ago appeared a new and extended edition of the stories collection about children in Auschwitz, Childhood Behind Barbed Wire by Bogdan Bartnikowski. Bartnikowski’s book is one of the most touching documents that depicts the tragic fate of the prisoners in Auschwitz and shows the shocking image of the camp as seen through the eyes of a child. At the age of 12, the author participated as a liaison in the uprising battles in Ochata and was deported to Auschwitz together with his mother on 12th August 1944.
Transports of Poles to Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz from Warsaw after the Outbreak of the Uprising
Almost thirteen thousand arrested men, women, and children from Warsaw were deported to Auschwitz by way of a transit camp in Pruszków in August and September 1944. They were imprisoned on the grounds of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp.
Among the deportees were people from various social groups and occupations (government officials, scientists, artists, doctors, merchants, and blue-collar workers), in various sorts of physical condition (wounded, sick, disabled, or pregnant), and of various ages from infants a few weeks old to people of 86 or more. In a few cases they were also of non-Polish ethnicity, including some Jews who were in hiding “on Aryan papers.”
The largest transports, carrying a total of almost six thousand people (including about four thousand females and two thousand males; more than a thousand of these deportees were children and young people of both sexes), arrived in Auschwitz on August 12 and 13.
Another transport of 3,087 men, women, and children was sent from Pruszków to Auschwitz on September 4. The next two transports, on September 13 and 17, involved almost four thousand men and boys; there were also three women among them. As part of the initial stages of the preliminary evacuation of Auschwitz, the majority of the people from these transports were sent within a few weeks or months to camps in the depths of the Third Reich and put to work in the armaments industry. Many of them died in these camps.
At least 602 women with children, including children born in camp, were deported to camps in Berlin in January 1945. Some of the prisoners from the Warsaw transports mentioned above were evacuated from Auschwitz in January 1945.Some of them died on the “Death March” and others survived to be liberated from camps in the depths of the German Reich. At least 298 men, women, and children deported there from Warsaw lived to see liberation at Auschwitz.
