The largest concentration camp in Poland. Auschwitz. Auschwitz I Concentration Camp
In the city of Auschwitz, 60 km from Krakow, there is the Polish State Museum, a UNESCO World Heritage Site - Auschwitz-Birkenau... During World War II, the largest complex of German concentration camps in Poland was located here. The complex included 3 concentration camps and death camps: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II (Birkenau) and Auschwitz III (Monowitz).
The city of Auschwitz in German sounds like Auschwitz, in September 1939 it was occupied by Nazi troops and became part of the Third Reich. In 1940, a concentration camp was erected in the buildings of the former barracks in Auschwitz Auschwitz I... It later became the administrative center of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex. All one-story buildings were completed up to two-story ones, and the former vegetable storehouse became a crematorium and a morgue. The first builders of the camp were members of the Jewish community of Auschwitz, and here they would 
whether destroyed.
A gate leads to the Auschwitz I concentration camp, over which there is still a cynical cast-iron inscription in German "Arbeit macht Frei" - "Labor makes free" or "Labor liberates." The buildings in Auschwitz I were called blocks, and there were 24 of them. In 1941, the first test of mass poisoning of people with the Cyclone B gas was carried out in the basements of block 11. Since the experiment was deemed successful, the morgue at Crematorium I was rebuilt into a gas chamber. Furnaces and chambers exist to this day, as a kind of monument to the cruelty of the Nazis. In the yard m 
between blocks 10 and 11, prisoners were tortured and shot, now there are wreaths and candles burning here.
Around the perimeter, the concentration camp was surrounded by a double barbed wire fence, through which a high voltage current was passed, and in 1942 Auschwitz I was in addition surrounded by a high reinforced concrete wall.
Building Auschwitz IIknown as Birkenau (or in Polish Brzezinka, from the name of a nearby village), began in October 1941. Usually this part of the concentration camp is meant when they talk about the death camp in Auschwitz, since Birkenau was created specifically for mass destruction 
i am Jews and in area was much larger than Auschwitz I. Here, in one-story barracks, which in reality were ordinary stables, hundreds of thousands of people were kept. The composition of the prisoners was constantly changing: new prisoners from all over occupied Europe poured in a constant stream to the place of the destroyed.
A railway was built to the Auschwitz II camp, along which new prisoners were brought in trains every day 
at. They were divided into 4 groups:
The prisoners of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp got tattoos on their bodies with the assigned number, and also attached stripes in the form of a triangle to the camp clothes. The color of the patch depended on the reasons for the arrest: red were worn by political prisoners, green - criminals, black - gypsies and antisocial persons, pink - homosexuals, 
purple - Jehovah's Witnesses. In addition to this, the Jews also wore a yellow patch, which in the complex looked like the Star of David.
The inmates wore thin clothes that did not protect them from the cold, practically did not wash themselves, and very rarely ate food from rotten waste. All this, combined with grueling labor, led to quick deaths from various diseases.
Auschwitz III (Monsheep)was a group of about 40 small labor camps that were established around a common complex for the needs of mines and factories. There were prisoners who worked for the needs of the German concern “I. G. Farben, for example, produced synthetic rubber at the Buna enterprise. There are no guided tours here.
In November 1944, before the offensive of the USSR army, some of the able-bodied prisoners were transported deep into Germany. On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops entered Auschwitz and freed the prisoners who remained there. The exact number of victims who died in the Auschwitz concentration camp is still unknown; according to various estimates, it ranges from 1.2 to 4 million people.
In the modern museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, you can see the barracks in which the prisoners lived, the "medical" room where people were killed by injection, gas chambers, crematorium ovens, the wall of execution and many testimonies of the horror of those times: photographs, lists of the dead, historical 
certificates, belongings and letters of prisoners. Annually, the museum complex of concentration camps in Auschwitz, which is actually the "largest cemetery", is visited by about a million people. The site of the former concentration camp makes a depressing impression and makes you think that humanity should not allow such atrocities of the Nazis ever again.
Auschwitz is a city that has become a symbol of the ruthlessness of the fascist regime; the city where one of the most meaningless dramas in human history took place; a city where hundreds of thousands of people were brutally killed. In the concentration camps located here, the Nazis built the most terrible conveyors of death, destroying up to 20 thousand people every day ... Today I begin to talk about one of the most terrible places on earth - the concentration camps in Auschwitz. I warn you, the photos and descriptions left below can leave a heavy mark on the soul. Although personally I believe that everyone should touch and let these terrible pages of our history pass through themselves ...
There will be very few of my comments on the photographs in this post - this is a too delicate topic, to express my point of view on which, it seems to me, I have no moral right. I honestly admit that visiting the museum left a heavy scar on my heart, which still does not want to heal ...
Most of the photo comments are based on the travel guide (
The Auschwitz concentration camp was the largest Nazi concentration camp for Poles and prisoners of other nationalities, whom Hitler's fascism condemned to isolation and gradual destruction by hunger, hard work, experiments, as well as immediate death as a result of mass and individual executions. Since 1942, the camp has become the largest extermination center for European Jews. Most of the Jews deported to Auschwitz perished in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival, without registration or identification with camp numbers. That is why it is very difficult to establish the exact number of those killed - historians agree on a figure of about one and a half million people.
But back to the history of the camp. In 1939, Auschwitz and its surroundings became part of the Third Reich. The city was renamed Auschwitz. In the same year, the fascist command had the idea of \u200b\u200bcreating a concentration camp. The empty pre-war barracks near Auschwitz were chosen as the site for the creation of the first camp. The concentration camp is named Auschwitz-I.
The education order is dated April 1940. Rudolf Höss is appointed commandant of the camp. On June 14, 1940, the Gestapo sent the first prisoners to Auschwitz I - 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnow.
A gate with a cynical inscription: “Arbeit macht frei” (Labor makes free) leads to the camp, through which prisoners went to work every day and returned ten hours later. In a small square next to the kitchen, the camp band played marches that were supposed to speed up the movement of the prisoners and make it easier for the Nazis to recount them.
At the time of its foundation, the camp consisted of 20 buildings: 14 one-story and 6 two-story. In 1941-1942, by the forces of prisoners, one floor was added to all one-story buildings and eight more buildings were built. The total number of multi-storey buildings in the camp was 28 (except for the kitchen and utility buildings). The average number of prisoners ranged from 13-16 thousand prisoners, and in 1942 reached over 20 thousand. The prisoners were placed in blocks, using for this purpose also attics and basements.
Along with the increase in the number of prisoners, the territorial volume of the camp increased, which gradually turned into a huge plant for the extermination of people. Auschwitz I became the base for a whole network of new camps.
In October 1941, after there was no more room for the newly staying prisoners in Auschwitz I, work began on the construction of another concentration camp, called Auschwitz II (also known as Bireknau and Brzezinka). This camp was destined to become the largest in the system of Nazi death camps. I .
In 1943, another camp, Auschwitz III, was built in Monowitz near Auschwitz on the premises of the IG Ferbenindustrie plant. In addition, in 1942-1944, about 40 branches of the Auschwitz camp were built, which were subordinate to Auschwitz III and were located mainly near metallurgical plants, mines and factories using prisoners as cheap labor.
Clothes and all personal items were taken from the prisoners who arrived, they were cut, disinfected and washed, and then they were given numbers and registered. Initially, each of the prisoners was photographed in three positions. In 1943, prisoners began to be tattooed - Auschwitz became the only Nazi camp in which prisoners were tattooed with their number.
Depending on the reasons for the arrest, the prisoners received triangles of different colors, which were sewn onto the camp clothes together with the numbers. Political prisoners were entitled to a red triangle, Jews wore a six-pointed star, consisting of a yellow triangle and a triangle of the color that corresponded to the reason for the arrest. Gypsies and those prisoners whom the Nazis considered antisocial elements received black triangles. Purple triangles were sewn on to Jehovah's Witnesses, pink to homosexuals, and green to criminals.
The scarce striped clothing of the camp did not protect the prisoners from the cold. The linen was changed at intervals of several weeks, and sometimes even at monthly intervals, and the prisoners did not have the opportunity to wash it, which led to epidemics of various diseases, especially typhus and typhoid fever, as well as scabies.
The hands of the camp clock ruthlessly and monotonously measured the prisoner's life time. From morning to evening gong, from one bowl of soup to the next, from the first check to the moment when the corpse of the prisoner was counted for the last time.
One of the scourges of camp life was verification, which was used to check the number of prisoners. They lasted several, and sometimes more than ten hours. The camp authorities very often announced penalty checks, during which prisoners had to squat or kneel. There were also cases when they were ordered to keep their hands up for several hours.
Along with executions and gas chambers, exhausting work was an effective means of exterminating prisoners. The prisoners were employed in various sectors of the economy. At first, they worked during the construction of the camp: they built new buildings and barracks, roads and drainage ditches. A little later, industrial enterprises of the Third Reich began to use the cheap labor of prisoners more and more often. The prisoner was ordered to do the work at a run, without a second of rest. The pace of work, scanty portions of food, as well as constant beatings and bullying increased mortality. During the return of the prisoners to the camp, the killed or wounded were dragged or carried in wheelbarrows or carts.
The daily diet of the prisoner was 1300-1700 calories. For breakfast, the prisoner received about a liter of "coffee" or a decoction of herbs, for lunch - about 1 liter of lean soup, often made from rotten vegetables. Dinner consisted of 300-350 grams of black clay bread and a small amount of other additives (eg 30 g of sausage or 30 g of margarine or cheese) and a drink made from herbs or "coffee".
In Auschwitz I, most of the inmates lived in two-story brick buildings. Housing conditions at all times of the camp existence were catastrophic. The prisoners brought in by the first echelons slept on straw scattered on the concrete floor. Later, hay bedding was introduced. The room, which barely accommodated 40-50 people, slept about 200 prisoners. The three-tiered bunks installed later did not at all improve living conditions. More often than not, 2 prisoners lay on one tier of the bunks.
The malarial climate of Auschwitz, poor living conditions, hunger, scanty clothes that were not removable for a long time, unwashed and unprotected from the cold, rats and insects led to massive epidemics that dramatically reduced the number of prisoners. A large number of patients who went to the hospital were not admitted due to overcrowding. In this regard, SS doctors periodically carried out selection among both patients and among prisoners in other buildings. Weakened, and not promising a quick recovery, they were sent to death in gas chambers or killed in the hospital, injecting them directly into the heart of a dose of phenol.
That is why the inmates called the hospital "the vestibule of the crematorium." In Auschwitz, prisoners were subjected to numerous criminal experiments by SS doctors. For example, Professor Karl Klauberg, in order to develop a quick method of biological destruction of the Slavs, conducted criminal sterilization experiments on Jewish women in building No. 10 of the main camp. Dr. Josef Mengele, within the framework of genetic and anthropological experiments, conducted experiments on twins and children with disabilities.
In addition, various experiments were carried out in Auschwitz with the use of new drugs and drugs: toxic substances were rubbed into the epithelium of prisoners, skin grafts were carried out ... During these experiments, hundreds of prisoners and prisoners died.
Despite the difficult living conditions, constant terror and danger, the prisoners of the camp conducted secret underground activities against the Nazis. It took many forms. Establishing contacts with the Polish population living in the vicinity of the camp made possible the illegal transfer of food and medicine. From the camp information was transmitted about the crimes committed by the SS, surname lists of prisoners, SS men and material evidence of crimes. All parcels were hidden in various, often specially designed objects, and the correspondence between the camp and the centers of the resistance movement was encrypted.
In the camp, work was carried out to provide assistance to prisoners and explanatory work in the field of international solidarity against Hitlerism. Cultural activities were also carried out, which consisted in organizing discussions and meetings at which prisoners recited the best works of Russian literature, as well as in secretly conducting divine services.
Verification area - here the SS members checked the number of prisoners.
Here, public executions were carried out on a portable or common gallows.
In July 1943, the SS men hanged 12 Polish prisoners on it for maintaining relations with the civilian population and helping 3 comrades escape.
The yard between buildings No. 10 and No. 11 is fenced with a high wall. Wooden shutters on the windows in block 10 were supposed to make it impossible to observe the executions taking place here. Before the "Wall of Death", the SS men shot several thousand prisoners, mostly Poles.
There was a camp prison in the undergrounds of building 11. In the halls on the right and left sides of the corridor, prisoners were placed awaiting the verdict of the court-martial, which came to Auschwitz from Katowice and, during the session, which lasted 2-3 hours, passed from several dozen to over one hundred death sentences.
Before execution, everyone had to undress in the washing rooms, and if the number of those sentenced to death was too small, the sentence was carried out right there. If the number of those sentenced was sufficient, they were taken through a small door to be shot to the “Wall of Death”.
The SS system of punishment in Hitler's concentration camps was part of a well-planned, deliberate extermination of prisoners. The prisoner could be punished for everything: for picking an apple, relieving himself during work, or for pulling out his own tooth in order to exchange it for bread, even for work that was too slow, according to the SS man.
The prisoners were punished with lashes. They were hanged by twisted arms on special poles, placed in the dungeons of a camp prison, forced to perform penalty exercises, racks, or sent to penalty teams.
In September 1941, an attempt was made here to massacre people using the poisonous gas "Cyclone B". Then about 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick prisoners from the camp hospital died.
Cells located in the basements housed inmates and civilians who were suspected of having links with prisoners or assisting in escapes, prisoners sentenced to starvation for the escape of a cellmate, and those whom the SS considered guilty of violating camp rules or against whom an investigation was conducted ...
All the property that the people deported to the camp brought with them was taken away by the SS. It was sorted and stacked in the huge barracks in Auszivets II. These warehouses were called "Canada". I will tell you more about them in the next report.
The property located in the warehouses of concentration camps was then exported to the Third Reich for the needs of the Wehrmacht. The gold teeth that were removed from the corpses of murdered people were melted into ingots and sent to the Central SS Sanitary Administration. The ashes of the burnt prisoners were used as manure or were covered with nearby ponds and river beds.
Items that previously belonged to people who died in the gas chambers were used by SS men who were part of the camp staff. For example, they turned to the commandant with a request to issue baby carriages, things for babies and other items. Despite the fact that the looted property was constantly taken out in whole trains, the warehouses were overflowing, and the space between them was often filled with piles of unsorted luggage.
As the Soviet Army approached Auschwitz, the most valuable things were urgently removed from the warehouses. A few days before the liberation, the SS men set fire to the warehouses, erasing the traces of the crime. Thirty barracks burned down, and in those that remained, after liberation, many thousands of pairs of shoes, clothes, toothbrushes, shaving brushes, glasses, prostheses were found ...
While liberating the camp at Auschwitz, the Soviet Army found about 7 tons of hair in the warehouses, packed in bags. These were the remnants that the camp authorities did not manage to sell and send to the factories of the Third Reich. The analysis showed that they have traces of hydrogen cyanide, a special poisonous component of drugs called "Cyclone B". From human hair, German firms, among other products, produced a tailor's hair band. Found in one of the cities, rolls of bead, which are in a showcase, were given for analysis, the results of which showed that it was made of human hair, most likely female.
It is very difficult to imagine the tragic scenes that were played out in the camp every day. Former prisoners - artists - tried to convey the atmosphere of those days in their work.
Hard work and hunger led to the complete exhaustion of the body. From hunger, the prisoners fell ill with dystrophy, which very often ended in death. These photographs were taken after release; they show adult prisoners weighing from 23 to 35 kg.
In Auschwitz, in addition to adults, there were also children who were sent to the camp with their parents. First of all, these were the children of Jews, Gypsies, as well as Poles and Russians. Most Jewish children died in the gas chambers immediately after arriving at the camp. Few of them, after careful selection, were sent to the camp, where they obeyed the same strict rules as adults. Some of the children, such as twins, were subjected to criminal experiments.
One of the scariest exhibits is a model of one of the crematoria in the Auschwitz II camp. On average, about 3 thousand people were killed and burned in such a building per day ...
And this is the crematorium in Auschwitz I. It was located behind the camp fence.
The largest room in the crematorium was the morgue, which was converted into a temporary gas chamber. Here in 1941 and 1942 Soviet prisoners and Jews from the ghettos organized by the Germans in Upper Silesia were killed.
The second part contains two of the three furnaces reconstructed from the preserved original metal elements, in which about 350 bodies were burned during the day. Each retort simultaneously accommodated 2-3 corpses.
The Nazi sadists largely repeated the actions of their Polish predecessors. ( And if the Germans acted more like ants - doing routine work, then the Poles killed with passion and pleasure - arctus)
It is known that in Poland history has long been a character actively acting on the political scene. Therefore, bringing “historical skeletons” onto this stage has always been a favorite pastime of those Polish politicians who do not have solid political baggage and, therefore, prefer to engage in historical speculation.
Original taken from arctus in the Polish concentration camps of the 20s surpassed the Nazi in atrocities
The situation in this regard received a new impetus when, after winning the parliamentary elections in October 2015, the party of the ardent Russophobe Yaroslav Kachinsky “Law and Justice” (“PiS”) returned to power. Andrzej Duda, a protege of this party, became the President of Poland. The new president already on February 2, 2016 at a meeting of the National Development Council formulated a conceptual approach to Warsaw's foreign policy: “The historical policy of the Polish state should be an element of our position in the international arena. It must be offensive. "
An example of such "offensiveness" was a recent bill approved by the Polish government. It provides for imprisonment for up to three years for the phrase "Polish concentration camp" or "Polish death camps", in relation to the Nazi camps that operated in occupied Poland during World War II. The author of the bill, the Polish Minister of Justice, explained the need for its adoption by the fact that such a law would more effectively protect the "historical truth" and "the good name of Poland."
In this regard, a little history. The phrase "Polish death camp" came into use largely with the "light hand" of Jan Karski, an active participant in the Polish anti-Nazi resistance. In 1944 he published an article in Colliers Weekly (Collier Weekly) entitled “The Polish Death Camp”.
In it, Karsky described how he, disguised as a German soldier, secretly visited the ghetto in Izbitsa Lubelskaya, from which prisoners of Jews, Gypsies and others were sent to the Nazi extermination camps Belzec and Sobibor. Thanks to Karski's article and then his book Courier from Poland: Story of a Secret State, the world first learned about the Nazi massacre of Jews in Poland.
Note that for 70 years after World War II, the phrase "Polish death camp" was generally understood as a Nazi death camp located in Poland.
The problems began when US President Barack Obama in May 2012, posthumously awarding Y. Karski with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in his speech mentioned the “Polish death camp”. Poland was outraged and demanded an explanation and an apology, since such a phrase allegedly cast a shadow on Polish history. Pope Francis' visit to Poland in July 2016 added fuel to the fire. Then in Krakow, Francis met with the only woman born and survived in the Nazi camp Auschwitz (Auschwitz). In his speech, the Pope called her birthplace “the Polish concentration camp of Auschwitz”. This reservation was replicated by the Vatican Catholic portal "IlSismografo". Poland rebelled again. These are the well-known origins of the above-mentioned Polish bill.
However, the point here is not only in the aforementioned unfortunate reservations of world leaders about the Nazi camps.
The Polish authorities, in addition, urgently need to block any recollections that in Poland in 1919-1922. there was a network of concentration camps for Red Army prisoners of war captured during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920.
It is known that according to the conditions of the existence of prisoners of war in them, these camps were the forerunners of the Nazi concentration camps of death.
However, the Polish side does not want to admit this documented fact and reacts very painfully when statements or articles appear in the Russian media that mention Polish concentration camps. Thus, a sharply negative reaction from the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in the Russian Federation was caused by the article Dmitry Ofitserov-Belsky Associate Professor of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Perm) under the title " Indifferent and patient"(05.02.2015.Lenta.ru https://lenta.ru/articles/2015/02/04/poland/).
In this article, the Russian historian, analyzing the uneasy Polish-Russian relations, called the Polish POW camps concentration camps, and also called the Nazi death camp Auschwitz Auschwitz. He thereby allegedly cast a shadow not only on the Polish city of Auschwitz, but also on Polish history. The reaction of the Polish authorities, as always, was not long in coming.
Deputy Polish Ambassador to the Russian Federation Yaroslav Ksionzek in a letter to the editorial office of "Lenta.ru" stated that the Polish side categorically objects to the use of the definition "Polish concentration camps", because it in no way corresponds to the historical truth. In Poland during the period 1918 - 1939. such camps allegedly did not exist.
However, Polish diplomats, refuting Russian historians and publicists, once again got into a puddle. I had to face critical assessments of my article “The Lie and Truth of Katyn”, published in the newspaper “Spetsnaz of Russia” (No. 4, 2012). The critic then was Grzegorz Telesnicki, I Secretary of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in the Russian Federation. In his letter to the editors of Spetsnaz of Russia, he categorically argued that the Poles did not participate in the Nazi exhumation of the Katyn burials in 1943.
Meanwhile, it is well known and documented that the specialists of the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross participated in the Nazi exhumation in Katyn from April to June 1943, performing, according to the Minister of Nazi Propaganda and the main falsifier of the Katyn crime J. Goebbels, the role of “objective” witnesses. The statement of Mr. J. Ksenzhik about the absence of concentration camps in Poland, which is easily refuted by documents, is just as false.
Polish forerunners of Auschwitz-Birkenau
To begin with, I will conduct a small educational program for Polish diplomats. Let me remind you that in the period 2000-2004. Russian and Polish historians, in accordance with the Agreement between Rosarkhiv and the General Directorate of State Archives of Poland, signed on December 4, 2000, prepared a collection of documents and materials " Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity in 1919-1922"(Hereinafter the collection" Red Army men ... ").
This 912-page collection was published in Russia with a circulation of 1 thousand copies. (M .; SPb.: Summer Garden, 2004). It contains 338 historical documents that reveal a very unpleasant situation that reigned in Polish prisoner of war camps, including concentration camps. Apparently, for this reason, the Polish side not only did not publish this collection in Polish, but also took measures to buy up part of the Russian edition.
So, in the collection "Red Army men ..." document No. 72 is presented, called "Temporary instruction for concentration camps of prisoners of war, approved by the High Command of the Polish Army."
Here is a small quote from this document: “... Following the orders of the Supreme Command No. 2800 / III of 18.IV.1920, No. 17000 / IV of 18.IV.1920, No. 16019 / II, and 6675 / San. a temporary instruction is issued for concentration camps ... Camps for Bolshevik prisoners, which are to be created by order of the High Command of the Polish Army No. 17000 / IV in Zvyagel and Ploskirov, and then Zhitomir, Korosten and Bar, bear the name "Concentration camp for prisoners of war No. ...».
So, Panova, a question arises. How, having passed the law on the inadmissibility of naming Polish concentration camps, will you deal with those Polish historians who dare to refer to the above-mentioned "Temporary Instruction ..."? But I will leave this question for the consideration of Polish lawyers and return to the Polish prisoner of war camps, including those called concentration camps.
Acquaintance with the documents contained in the collection "Red Army men ..." allows us to confidently assert that the point is not in the name, but in the essence of the Polish prisoner of war camps. They created such inhuman conditions for the detention of Red Army prisoners of war that they can rightfully be considered as the forerunners of Nazi concentration camps.
This is evidenced by the absolute majority of documents posted in the collection "Red Army men ...".
To substantiate my conclusion, I will allow myself to refer to the testimonies of former prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau Ota Kraus (No. 73046) and Erich Kulki(No. 73043). They passed the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau and were well aware of the order established in these camps. Therefore, in the title of this chapter, I used the name "Auschwitz-Birkenau", since it was precisely this name that was used by O. Kraus and E. Kulka in their book "Death Factory" (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1960).
The atrocities of the guards and the living conditions of Red Army prisoners of war in Polish camps are very reminiscent of the atrocities of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau. For those in doubt, I will quote a few quotes from the book "Factory of Death".
O. Kraus and E. Kulka wrote that
- “They didn't live in Birkenau, but huddled in wooden barracks 40 meters long and 9 meters wide. The barracks had no windows, were poorly lit and ventilated ... In total, the barracks housed 250 people. There were no washrooms or toilets in the barracks. The prisoners were forbidden to leave the barrack at night, so at the end of the barrack there were two tubs for sewage ... ”.
- “Exhaustion, illness and death of prisoners were caused by insufficient and bad food, and more often by real hunger ... There were no dishes for food in the camp ... The prisoner received less than 300 grams of bread. The prisoners were given bread in the evening, and they immediately ate it. In the morning they received half a liter of a black liquid called coffee, or tea, and a tiny portion of sugar. At lunch, the prisoner received less than a liter of stew, which should have contained 150 g of potatoes, 150 g of turnips, 20 g of flour, 5 g of butter, 15 g of bones. In fact, it was impossible to find such modest doses of food in the soup ... With poor nutrition and hard work, a strong and healthy beginner could only survive for three months ... ".
« For whole groups of prisoners ... usually a punishment was applied which was called "sports"... Prisoners were forced to quickly fall to the ground and jump up, crawl and squat ... Transfer to a prison block was a common measure for certain offenses. And being in this block meant certain death ... In the blocks, the prisoners slept without mattresses, right on bare boards ... Along the walls and in the middle of the infirmary block, bunks with mattresses soaked in human secretions were installed ... The patients lay next to the dying and already dead prisoners».
Below I will give similar examples from Polish camps. Surprisingly, the Nazi sadists in many ways repeated the actions of their Polish predecessors. So, we open the collection "Red Army men ...". Here is document # 164 called “ Report on the results of the inspection of the camps in Domba and Stshalkovo"(October 1919).
- “Inspection of the Dombey camp ... Wooden buildings. The walls are loose, some buildings have no wooden floor, the chambers are large ... Most of the prisoners without shoes are completely barefoot. There are almost no beds and bunks ... No straw, no hay. They sleep on the ground or boards ... No linen, no clothes; cold, hunger, dirt and all this threatens with enormous mortality ... ".
- “Report on the inspection of the Stshalkovo camp. ... The state of health of the prisoners is appalling, the hygienic conditions of the camp are disgusting. Most of the buildings are dugouts with perforated roofs, an earthen floor, boardwalk is very rare, the windows are filled with boards instead of glass ... Many barracks are overcrowded. So, on October 19 this year. the barrack for communist prisoners was so crowded that it was difficult to see anything when entering it in the midst of the fog. The prisoners were so crowded that they could not lie down, but were forced to stand, leaning against one another ... ".
It was mentioned in document # 333 " Note of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation to the chairman of the Polish delegation with a protest against the conditions of detention of prisoners in Strzhalkovo"(December 29, 1921) and in document number 334" Note of the RSFSR Plenipotentiary Mission in Warsaw of the Polish Foreign Ministry on the abuse of Soviet prisoners of war in the Strzhalkovo camp"(January 5, 1922).
It should be noted that beating of prisoners of war was common in both Nazi and Polish camps. Thus, in the aforementioned document No. 334, it was noted that in the Stshalkovo camp “ to the present day, there have been desecrations of the prisoners. Beatings of prisoners of war are a constant occurrence ...". It turns out that cruel beatings of prisoners of war in the Stshalkovo camp were practiced from 1919 to 1922.
This is confirmed by document No. 44 " The attitude of the Ministry of Defense of Poland to the Supreme Command of the Interim Government regarding an article from the newspaper "Kurier novy" about the mockery of Latvians who have deserted from the Red Army with a covering note from the Ministry of Defense of Poland to the Supreme Command"(January 16, 1920). It says that the Latvians, upon arrival at the Stshalkovo camp (apparently in the fall of 1919), were first robbed, leaving them in their underwear, and then each of them received 50 blows with a barbed wire rod. More than ten Latvians died from blood poisoning, and two were shot without trial.
Responsible for this barbarism were the head of the camp, captain Wagner and his assistant lieutenant Malinovsky, characterized by sophisticated cruelty.
This is described in document No. 314 " Letter of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation to the Polish delegation of PRUSK with a request to take action on the statement of the Red Army prisoners of war in relation to the former commandant of the camp in Stshalkovo"(03 September 1921).
The statement of the Red Army men said that
- “Lieutenant Malinovsky always walked around the camp, accompanied by several corporals, who had in their hands plaits-lashes made of wire and ordered those who did not like him to lie down in the ditch, and the corporals beat as ordered. If the beaten groaned or asked for mercy, then. Malinovsky would take out his revolver and shoot ... If the sentries would shoot prisoners. Malinowski gave them 3 cigarettes and 25 Polish marks as a reward ... More than once it was possible to observe how the group was headed by. Malinovskiy climbed onto machine-gun towers and fired at defenseless people from there ... ”.
Like the Nazis, the Polish authorities used famine as an effective means of exterminating captured Red Army soldiers. Thus, document No. 168 "Telegram of the Modlin fortified area to the POWs section of the High Command of the Polish Army about the mass illness of prisoners of war in the Modlin camp" (dated October 28, 1920) states that an epidemic is raging among the prisoners of war of the concentration station of prisoners and internees gastric diseases, 58 people died.
“The main causes of the disease are the eating of various damp cleanings by prisoners and the complete absence of footwear and clothing.". Note that this is not an isolated case of starvation deaths of prisoners of war, which is described in the documents of the collection "Red Army men ...".A general assessment of the situation prevailing in the Polish prisoner of war camps was given in document no. 310 “ Minutes of the 11th meeting of the Mixed (Russian, Ukrainian and Polish delegations) commission on repatriation on the situation of captured Red Army soldiers"(July 28, 1921) It was noted there that"
The RUD (Russian-Ukrainian delegation) could never allow the prisoners to be treated so inhumanly and with such cruelty ... RUD does not recall that continuous nightmare and horror of beatings, mutilations and continuous physical extermination, which was carried out to the Russian prisoners of war of the Red Army, especially the communists, in the first days and months of captivity ....In the same protocol it was noted that “The Polish command of the camps, as if in revenge after the first arrival of our delegation, sharply increased their repression ... The Red Army men are beaten and tortured for any reason and for no reason ... the beatings took the form of an epidemic ... When the camp command considers it possible to provide more human conditions for the existence of prisoners of war, then prohibitions come from the Center».
A similar assessment is given in document No. 318 " From the note of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR to the Charge d'Affaires of the Republic of Poland T. Fillipovich on the situation and death of prisoners of war in Polish camps"(September 9, 1921).
It said: “
According to the calculations of the Russian military historian M.V. Filimoshin, the number of those killed and died in Polish captivity of the Red Army is 82,500 people (Filimoshin. Voenno-istoricheskiy zhurnal, No. 2. 2001). This figure seems to be quite reasonable. I believe that the above suggests that Polish concentration camps and POW camps can rightfully be considered the forerunners of Nazi concentration camps.
I refer those distrustful and inquisitive readers to my research " Antikatyn, or the Red Army in Polish captivity", Presented in my books" The Secret of Katyn "(Moscow: Algorithm, 2007) and" Katyn. Modern history of the issue ”(Moscow: Algorithm, 2012). It gives a more comprehensive picture of what was happening in the Polish camps.
Violence over dissent
It is impossible to complete the topic of Polish concentration camps without mentioning two camps: the Belarusian “ Birch-Kartuzskaya"And Ukrainian" Bialy Podlaski". They were created in 1934 by the decision of the Polish dictator Jozef Piłsudskias a means of reprisals against Belarusians and Ukrainians who protested against the Polish occupation regime of 1920-1939. Although they were not called concentration camps, in some ways they surpassed the Nazi concentration camps.
But before about how many Belarusians and Ukrainians accepted the Polish regime established in the territories of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine captured by the Poles in 1920 ... This is what the newspaper Rzeczpospolita wrote in 1925.« ... If there are no changes for several years, then we will have there (in the Eastern Cresce) a general armed uprising. If we do not drown it in blood, it will tear off several provinces from us ... There is a gallows for the uprising and nothing else. Horror must fall on all the local (Belarusian) population from top to bottom, from which blood will freeze in its veins » .
In the same year, the famous Polish publicist Adolf Nevchinskyon the pages of the newspaper "Slovo" stated that with the Belarusians it is necessary to conduct a conversation in the language of "gallows and only gallows ... this will be the most correct solution of the national question in Western Belarus».
Feeling public support, Polish sadists in Bereza-Kartuzskaya and Biala Podlaska did not stand on ceremony with the recalcitrant Belarusians and Ukrainians. If the Nazis created concentration camps as monstrous factories of mass extermination of people, then in Poland such camps were used as a means of intimidating the disobedient. How else to explain the monstrous tortures that Belarusians and Ukrainians were subjected to. I will give examples.
In Bereza-Kartuzskaya, 40 people were packed into small cells with a cement floor. To prevent the prisoners from sitting down, the floor was constantly watered. In the cell, they were forbidden even to talk. They tried to turn people into dumb cattle. A regime of silence for prisoners was also in effect in the hospital. They beat me for moans, for gnashing of teeth from unbearable pain.
The leadership of Bereza-Kartuzskaya cynically called it "the most sporting camp in Europe." It was forbidden to walk here - only by running. Everything was done on the whistle. Even a dream was on such a command. Half an hour on the left side, then the whistle, and immediately roll over to the right. Those who hesitated or did not hear the whistle in a dream were immediately tortured. Before such a "sleep", several buckets of water with bleach were poured into the rooms where the prisoners slept, for "prevention". The Nazis did not manage to think of this.
The conditions in the punishment cell were even more dire.The offenders were kept there from 5 to 14 days. To intensify the suffering, several buckets of feces were poured onto the floor of the punishment cell.... The parasha in the punishment cell has not been cleaned for months. The room was swarming with worms. In addition, the camp practiced such group punishment as cleaning camp toilets with glasses or mugs.
Bereza-Kartuzskaya Commandant Yusef Kamal-Kurgan in responding to statements that prisoners cannot withstand torture conditions and prefer death, calmly stated: “ The more they take a break here, the better it will live in my Poland.».
I believe that the above is enough to imagine what the Polish camps for the recalcitrant are, and the story about the Biala Podlaska camp will be redundant.
In conclusion, I will add that the use of faeces for torture was a favorite means of Polish gendarmesapparently suffering from unsatisfied sadomasochistic inclinations. There are known facts when the employees of the Polish defensives forced the arrested to clean the toilets with their hands, and then, not allowing them to wash their hands, they gave lunch rations. Those who refused, they wrung their hands. Sergey Osipovich Pritytsky, a Belarusian fighter against the Polish occupation regime in the 1930s, recalled how Polish police officers poured slurry into his nose.
Such an unpleasant truth about the "skeleton in the Polish closet" called "concentration camps" forced me to tell the Panova from Warsaw and the Polish Embassy in the Russian Federation.
P.S. Panove, please keep in mind. I am not a polonophobe. I watch Polish films with pleasure, listen to Polish pop music and regret that I did not master the Polish language in my time. But I “hate it” when Polish Russophobes impudently misinterpret the history of Polish-Russian relations with the tacit consent of official Russia.
Concentration camps of the Polish landlord for the Russians ...We all know the word "Katyn". But which of us knows about the Stshalkov concentration camp? But, in it, many more Soviet citizens were killed than the Poles were shot in Katyn. Russia recognized the destruction of the Polish military as a crime. But has anyone heard the words of repentance from the Poles for the death of our great-grandfathers? Stshalkov was not the only concentration camp where the massacre of the Soviet military was carried out - there were at least four more camps in Dombier, Pikulitsa, Wadowice and Tuchola.
The Young Guard of United Russia went to the Polish embassy with a demand to provide access to Polish archives for Russian historians. We have no right to allow Poland to speculate on history. Access to archives is critical so that not only Russian society, but also the Poles themselves, know in which country they live. What happened to their homeland less than 100 years ago. What crimes were committed by the Polish state at that time.
First of all, of course, an impartial assessment must be given to the atrocities of the Polish regime, which ruthlessly destroyed Soviet prisoners of war. According to various estimates, during the Soviet-Polish clashes in 1919-1921, from 140 to 200 thousand Soviet soldiers were captured, according to various estimates. About 80 thousand of them died in Poland from hunger, disease, torture, execution and abuse. The Poles call the figure of 85 thousand prisoners and 20 thousand dead, but it does not stand up to criticism, since only in the Battle of Warsaw the number of Red Army soldiers taken prisoner is about 60 thousand people. This crime has no statute of limitations. And Poland has not yet made any apologies for the historic atrocity, in scale corresponding to the massacres in Buchenwald and Auschwitz.
Polish President Lech Kaczynski assures that the soldiers died from typhus. I just want to look him in the eye and ask: all 80 thousand died from typhus? We know from the testimonies of those who were in Polish captivity that our soldiers were starved to death, kept in the barracks in terrible crowding, and did not provide medical assistance. In addition to using them for hard work, torture and executions, all of the above, together, of course, could not but lead to the fact that the prisoners died. In fact, the concentration camps where they were kept turned into huge necropolises.
The truth about the atrocities of the Polish authorities, which led to the death of our ancestors, is in the archives of Poland. Obviously, it will become available to researchers sooner or later. And a lot here will depend on the Polish leadership - either it will provide access to the archives and bring repentance for the actions of its predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s, or it will be on a par with the chauvinist Polish regime, which ended its existence in 1939. together with Poland.
By the way, one of the arguments of the defenders of Poland and the Polish version of history concerning the fact that the Poles destroyed Soviet prisoners of war who invaded Poland, and therefore were "entitled", should be rejected right away. Not only because of inhumanity, but also because of obvious antihistoricism.
Back in March 1917, immediately after the overthrow of Nicholas II, Russia recognized the right of the Polish state to a sovereign existence. It was also confirmed by the Bolsheviks in 1918, on the eve of the end of the First World War. But it was the new Polish leadership, headed by Jozef Pilsudski, guided by the concept of "Intermarium" (restoration of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with the territory up to the partitions) that began the war of conquest along the borders of the former Russian Empire, Germany and Austria-Hungary. The details of the atrocities of the Polish military, especially Haller's army, as well as the gangs of Stanislav Balakhovich, controlled by Warsaw, are widely known.
In the course of this war, which even unscrupulous historians would not call an aggressive war on the part of the USSR, the Poles captured from 140 to 200 thousand Soviet soldiers. Only 65 thousand people returned from captivity after the conclusion of the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921. The truth about the tens of thousands of victims must be established. Just as the exact number of the Red Army soldiers killed in Poland should be established.
The question of Poland's destruction of the Belarusian education system awaits its researchers. It is known that from 1920 to 1939 the number of schools where teaching was conducted in the Belarusian language was reduced from 400 to ... 0 (in words - to zero). Also, Poland's practice of carrying out punitive expeditions against the Ukrainians, called "pacification", should also wait for their researcher. The actions of the Poles against the Ukrainians were so egregious that in 1932 the League of Nations even adopted a special decree that Poland was oppressing the Ukrainian nation. In turn, in 1934, Warsaw notified the League of Nations of the unilateral termination of the treaty on the protection of national minorities.
The existence in Poland of concentration camps for opponents of the Polish chauvinist state with its one-party system, uncontrolled punitive bodies, authoritarian central government and Nazi policy towards the non-Polish population should not be ignored either. Yes Yes. Poland in the 30s was just such an undemocratic state! Yes Yes. Poland in the 30s erected concentration camps for dissidents! The most famous is Bereza-Kartuzskaya: five protective rows of barbed wire, a moat with water, several more rows of energized thorns, watchtowers with machine gunners and guards with German shepherds. The Nazis in Germany had someone to learn from!
Even the most fully outlined question of Polish anti-Semitism is still waiting for its meticulous researcher. The archives will add a lot to how the persecution of Jews was carried out at the state level. The shameful "Jewish" benches in universities are just the most obvious signs of Poland's anti-Semitic policies. Much more important is the prohibition for Jews (as well as Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians) to hold public office. Access to credit was difficult for Jews, and they were prevented from doing business. Jews were almost completely excluded from education - for example, in the whole of Poland there were only 11 Jewish professors working at universities. For students, there were "Days without Jews", when Jews were expelled from universities. Since access to government services was closed for Jews, Jews who received legal education often went to the bar. The Poles solved this problem simply by closing access to the legal profession to Jews in 1937.
In the late 1930s, anti-Semitism reached a new level of almost official segregation. In Kalisz, in 1937, the market square was divided into non-Jewish and Jewish parts. In some cities, a public movement for the expulsion of Jews and even for the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, following the example of Germany, expanded. The authoritative researcher of the problem of anti-Semitism in Poland, Doctor of Science at Columbia University Celia Stopnicka-Heller sadly stated on this occasion: “The Germans have just finished, and then with the help of the Poles themselves, the case started by the Polish anti-Semites”. I must say that the researcher knew what she was saying, since she was born in Poland in 1927.
Poland's foreign policy cannot be ignored either. Who, if not Warsaw, signed a non-aggression pact with Germany on January 26, 1934? Russian intelligence has every reason to believe that this agreement was also accompanied by the signing of secret protocols or secret agreements directed against the USSR. And, although the Poles in every possible way deny this, it is clear that the evidence confirming or refuting the fact of the conclusion of the secret protocol is in the archives of Poland. They are also waiting for their discoverer.
Poland's participation in the partition of Czechoslovakia is a historical fact. Like a jackal that feeds on scraps, Warsaw licked off the handouts that France, Germany and Britain planted on it in the 1938 Munich Agreement. The only country that was ready to send troops to help Czechoslovakia was the USSR. But the Soviet troops were not allowed through its territory ... Poland.
The secret activities of the Polish leadership against the USSR are also known. Operation Prometheus, which includes subversive actions against the Soviet Union, organizing ethnic unrest, sabotage and espionage, is described by the Polish intelligence officers themselves, who refer to documents. These documents are again kept in the Polish archives, as well as many other evidence of the tragic events of that time.
It is understandable why Poland does not give historians access to its archives. Another thing is not clear - why, with such skeletons in your own closet, try to look for a speck in someone else's eye?
On January 27, 1945, the Auschwitz death camp was liberated. He was released by the Ukrainians, as told by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland Grzegorz Schetyna, since the operation was carried out by the forces of the 1st Ukrainian Front. Both in Poland itself and in Europe, the historical “discoveries” of the head of the Polish Foreign Ministry caused a storm of indignation, and he himself had to make excuses. However, this is not the first attempt to rewrite the history of the Second World War.
Infernal factories statistics
Concentration camps were invented long before Nazi Germany began to build them in Europe. However, Hitler became a "revolutionary" in this matter, setting one of the main tasks before the administration of the camps the mass extermination of representatives of "inferior nations" - Jews and Gypsies, as well as prisoners of war. Soon, when Germany began to suffer defeats on the Eastern Front, Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians were counted among the nations to be destroyed as "representatives of the flawed Slavs."
In total, fascist Germany created more than 1,500 camps on its own territory, and mainly in Eastern Europe, in which 16 million people were kept. 11 million were killed or they died from disease, hunger and overwork. There were more than 60 concentration camps in which more than 10 thousand people were held.
The worst among them were the "death camps" designed exclusively for the mass extermination of people. There are a dozen of them on the list.
Auschwitz
Auschwitz (in German - Auschwitz), which had three departments, occupied an area of \u200b\u200b40 square kilometers. It was the largest camp; according to various estimates, from 1.5 million to 3 million people died. At the Nuremberg Tribunal, a figure of 2.8 million was named. 90% of the victims were Jews. A significant percentage were Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.
It was a factory, soulless, mechanical, and even more terrible. At the first stage of the camp's existence, prisoners were shot. And in order to increase the "productivity" of this hellish machine, the technology was constantly "improved". Since the executioners could no longer cope with the burial of the constantly increasing number of those executed, a crematorium was built. Moreover, it was built by the prisoners themselves. Then the poison gas was tested and found to be "effective." This is how gas chambers appeared in Auschwitz.
Guard and supervisory functions were performed by the SS troops. All the same "routine work" was transferred to the prisoners themselves, the Sonderkommando: sorting clothes, carrying bodies, servicing the crematorium. In the most "tense" periods, up to 8 thousand bodies were burned in the ovens of Auschwitz every day.
This camp, like everyone else, practiced torture. Here the sadists got down to business. The doctor was in charge Josef Mengele, which, unfortunately, did not reach the Mossad, and he died a natural death in Latin America. He set up medical experiments on prisoners, performing monstrous abdominal operations without anesthesia.
Despite the heavily guarded camp, which included a high-voltage fence and 250 guard dogs, escape attempts were made at Auschwitz. But almost all of them ended in the death of prisoners.
And on October 4, 1944, an uprising took place. The members of the 12th Sonderkommando, having learned that they were going to be replaced with a new composition, which implied certain death, decided on desperate actions. Having blown up the crematorium, they killed three SS men, set fire to two lore and punched a breach in the energized fence, having previously arranged a short circuit. Up to half a thousand people were at large. But soon all the fugitives were caught and taken to the camp for a demonstration execution.
When in mid-January 1945 it became clear that Soviet troops would inevitably come to Auschwitz, able-bodied prisoners, who then numbered 58 thousand people, were driven deep into German territory. Two thirds of them died on the way from exhaustion and disease.
On January 27, at 3 pm, troops under the command of Marshal entered Auschwitz I. S. Koneva... At that time, there were about 7 thousand prisoners in the camp, among whom there were 500 children from 6 to 14 years old. The soldiers, who had time to look at many atrocities in the war, found traces of monstrous, transcendental atrocities in the camp. The scale of the "work done" was striking. In the warehouses were found mountains of men's suits and outerwear for women and children, several tons of human hair and ground bones, prepared for shipment to Germany.
In 1947, a memorial complex was opened on the territory of the former camp.
Treblinka
A death camp established in the Warsaw Voivodeship of Poland in July 1942. During the year of the camp's existence, about 800 thousand people, mostly Jews, were killed in it. Geographically, they were citizens of Poland, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Germany, USSR, Czechoslovakia, France and Yugoslavia. Jews were brought in boarded up freight cars. The rest were mostly invited “to a new place of residence,” and they bought train tickets with their own money.
The "technology" of mass murder here was different from that at Auschwitz. Arriving and unsuspecting people were invited to the gas chambers, on which were written "Showers". It was not poison gas that was used, but exhaust gases from working tank engines. The bodies were first buried in the ground. In the spring of 1943, the crematorium was built.
An underground organization was active among the members of the Sonderkommando. On August 2, 1943, she organized an armed uprising, seizing weapons. Part of the guards was killed, several hundred prisoners managed to escape. However, almost all of them were soon found and killed.
One of the few surviving participants in the uprising was Samuel Willenberg, who wrote the book "The Treblinka Uprising" after the war. Here's what he said in a 2013 interview about his first impression of the Death Factory:
“I had no idea what was happening in the infirmary. I just entered this wooden building and at the end of the corridor I suddenly saw all this horror. Bored Ukrainian guards with rifles sat on a wooden chair. In front of them is a deep hole. It contains the remains of bodies that have not yet been devoured by the fire lit under them. Remains of men, women and small children. This picture just paralyzed me. I heard burning hair and bones breaking. There was acrid smoke in my nose, tears welling up in my eyes ... How to describe and express this? There are things that I remember, but they cannot be expressed in words. "
After the brutal suppression of the uprising, the camp was liquidated.
Majdanek
The Majdanek camp, located in Poland, was originally intended to become a "universal" camp. But after the capture of a large number of Red Army soldiers who were encircled near Kiev, it was decided to re-profile it into a "Russian" camp. With the number of prisoners up to 250 thousand. Prisoners of war were engaged in construction. By December 1941, due to hunger, hard work, and also because of the outbreak of typhus, all the prisoners died, of which at that time there were about 10 thousand.
Subsequently, the camp lost its "national" orientation, and not only prisoners of war, but also Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and representatives of other nations were brought into it for the destruction.
The 270-hectare camp was divided into five sections. One was reserved for women and children. The prisoners were housed in 22 huge barracks. On the territory of the camp there were also industrial premises where prisoners worked. According to various sources, in Majdanek, from 80 thousand to 500 thousand people died.
In Majdanek, as in Auschwitz, poison gas was used in the gas chambers.
Against the background of daily crimes, the operation with the code name "Enterfest" (German - harvest festival) stands out. On November 3 and 4, 1943, 43 thousand Jews were shot. At the bottom of a ditch 100 meters long, 6 meters wide and 3 meters deep, the prisoners were tightly packed in one layer. Then they were successively killed by a shot in the back of the head. Then the second layer was laid ... And so on until the ditch was completely filled.
When the Red Army occupied Majdanek on July 22, 1944, there were several hundred surviving prisoners of various nationalities in the camp.
Sobibor
This camp operated in Poland from May 15, 1942 to October 15, 1943. Killed a quarter of a million people. The extermination of people took place according to a well-established "technology" - gas chambers based on exhaust gases, a crematorium.
The overwhelming majority of the prisoners were killed on the very first day. And only a few were left to perform various works in the workshops in the production area.
Sobibor became the first German camp in which an uprising took place. An underground group operated in the camp, headed by a Soviet officer, lieutenant Alexander Pechersky... Pechersky and his deputy rabbi Leon Feldhendler planned and led an uprising that began on October 14, 1943.
According to the plan, the prisoners were to secretly, one by one, eliminate the SS personnel of the camp, and then, taking possession of the weapons in the camp warehouse, interrupt the guards. It was only partially successful. Twelve SS men were killed and 38, according to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Ukrainian guards. But they failed to take possession of the weapon. Of the 550 prisoners in the working zone, 320 began to break out of the camp, 80 of them died in the escape. The rest managed to escape.
130 prisoners refused to flee, all of them were shot the next day.
A massive hunt was organized for the fugitives, which lasted two weeks. We managed to find 170 people who were immediately shot. Subsequently, another 90 people were extradited to the Nazis by the local population. 53 participants of the uprising survived until the end of the war.
The leader of the uprising, Alexander Aronovich Pechersky, was able to get into Belarus, where, before reuniting with the regular army, he fought as a demolitionist in a partisan detachment. Then, as part of the assault battalion of the 1st Baltic Front, he fought to the west, reaching the rank of captain. The war ended for him in August 1944, when Pechersky became disabled as a result of his injury. He died in 1990 in Rostov-on-Don.
Soon after the uprising, the Sobibor camp was liquidated. After the demolition of all buildings, its territory was plowed up and sown with potatoes and cabbage.
Snapshot in the opening article: surviving children after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz by Soviet troops, Poland, January 27, 1945 / Photo: TASS
