The history of World War II and the Holocaust

"Through work to freedom".
Drawing by Jan Baraś-Komski, former KL Auschwitz inmate no. 564/152884, Germany 1945. Property of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

"You have arrived here not to a sanatorium, but to a German concentration camp, from which there is no other way out than through the chimney. If someone doesn't like it, they can go straight to the barbed wire right now. If there are Jews in the transport, they have the right to live no longer than two weeks, priests a month, the rest three months".
Karl Fritzsch, deputy commandant (camp director) at KL Auschwitz.

"The tragedy of a mother", 1945.
Drawing by Jan Baraś-Komski, former KL Auschwitz inmate no. 564/152884. Property of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it...

A powerful, yet so deeply disturbing depiction of the final moments of existence of the Auschwitz camp.

Jerzy Potrzebowski - "On the ruins of the camp", 1961.

Jerzy Potrzebowski (1921-1974), born in Sandomierz in Poland and personally a friend of my aunt, a young student who was arrested by the German occupants and sent to the Auschwitz camp, where he arrived on May 24th, 1943. Registered in the camp with number 122836. In the same year transferred to KL Buchenwald, arrived on October 21st, registered with camp number 32118.
He survived the war and painted several astonishing pieces of art depicting the horrors of the Auschwitz camp.

"Crematorium I".

Drawing by Jan Baraś-Komski, former KL Auschwitz inmate no. 564/152884.

Pery Broad, one of the Auschwitz SS staff members recalls:

"The most heinous murder takes place in the mortuary. Ten prisoners enter the room naked. The walls are sprayed with blood. In the depths lie the bodies of the murdered. A wide stream of blood flows into the sewage in the middle of the hall.

Convicts must come close to the co**se and stand next to it. Their feet are sprayed with blood, in which they wade. Many people let out a sudden cry when they recognize a close relative lying on the floor, perhaps their father.

Palitzsch begins to wander among the shot and finishes off those who are still neighing or moving. Then he puts his weapon to his leg, turns to his master and stands at attention as a sign that he has done his will.

Mildner looks at him with a telling demonic smile, slowly raises his hand to Hitler's bow, and stands still in that pose for a few seconds. In this way, he pays tribute to his henchman".

"Then for the first time, we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we ill have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains." Primo Levi

Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.

An interesting, yet so disturbing drawing by Jan Baraś-Komski, former KL Auschwitz inmate no. 564/152884, entitled "Desecration of the bodies". Available to view until the end of March on the "Sonderkommando" temporary exhibition in former Block no. 21 at the Auschwitz Memorial.

https://issuu.com/msz.gov.pl/docs/nota_raczynskiego

Publication prepared on the occasion of 75th anniversary of the liberation of the German N**i concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz. The note “The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland” from 10 December 1942 is one of the most important efforts of the Polish state to highlight the crimes committed by N**i Germany on Jews in occupied Poland during the Second World War.

Not only was it the first official report informing the Allies and the West of the Holocaust in Europe, but it also became a testimony and a warning of the kind of atrocities that human beings driven by an extreme ideology are capable of – a vital lesson for future generations if a tragedy such as this is to never happen again.

KL AUSCHWITZ inmate no. 454 STANISŁAW WESOŁOWSKI.

Out of 728 Polish citizens who arrived in the first mass transport of inmates to the Auschwitz camp, no less than 292 had been murdered by the Germans during WWII (215 of those men died in Auschwitz alone). The fate of 111 men is unknown. 325 inmates from the first mass transport survived WWII.

Three inmates were in the camp from day 1 (June 14th, 1940) until the last day (January 27th, 1945). 1688 days in hell on earth...

One of those three remarkable men was STANISŁAW WESOŁOWSKI. He was born on the 25th of May, 1918, in Kraków, Poland. Arrested by the Germans, held in a Gestapo prison in Tarnów, deported from there to the Auschwitz camp on June 14th, 1940. On January 27th, 1945 he was liberated in the camp.

Picture: Władysław Siwek "Roll Call".