NEWS

THE NATIONAL DAY OF REMEMBER OF THE FIRE OF GERMANY’S CONCENTRATION OBLIGATIONS

Today is the anniversary of the first mass transport of Polish prisoners to the German Auschwitz camp. 728 Poles, mostly political prisoners, were transported from Tarnów prison.

On this occasion, in 2006 the Polish Sejm established this date – 14 June – the National Day of Memory of the Victims of German Concentration Camps and Extermination Camps.

The transport reached Auschwitz on the same day, i.e. 14 June in the afternoon. After the train arrived at the destination station, the prisoners were removed from the carriages, after which they were rushed to the basement of the erstwhile Polish Tobacco Monopoly building (located at the railway side and separated by barbed wire from another buildings). Prisoners were then subjected to the alleged procedure of admission to the camp, consisting of the deprivation of individual effects, bath, disinfection, removal of hair from the full body and registration with the granting of numbers. The number 31, beginning the registry of the political prisoners of Auschwitz, was given to Stanisław Ryniak (imported to Tarnow from Jarosław), and the closing number 758 – Ignacy Płacht from Łódź (stopped during an effort to illegally cross the border). The first transport besides included Bronisław Czech (skier and three-time Olympic, arrested in May 1940 in Zakopane).

At the end of the procedure, the prisoners were returned to their clothes, and they were taken out in the yard, where they were placed on Fridays for the first appeal. SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, deputy to the camp manager (Lagerführer), gave a speech that translated 2 prisoners who knew German. Its content was as follows: "You came here not to the sanatorium, but to the German concentration camp, from which there is no another way out than through the chimney. If anyone doesn't like it, they can be knitting right now. If there are Jews in transport, then they have the right to live no longer than 2 weeks, priests of the month, the remainder of 3 months.”

Back to news

Back to Main Page

Funded by Roman Dmowski and Ignacy Jan Paderewski Institute of National thought Heritage under the Patriotic Fund