THE WORDS OF HATRED POISON THE IMAGINATION AND STUPEFY CONSCIOUSNESS.
THE 74TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ
Paweł Sawicki
On January 27, more than 50 former prisoners of Auschwitz and Holocaust survivors met at the former Auschwitz camp to commemorate the 74th anniversary of the liberation of this German Nazi concentration and extermination camp. The event was held under the honorary patronage of the President of the Republic of Poland, Andrzej Duda.
The witnesses to history were accompanied among others, by the Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki, Deputy Prime Minister Beata Szydło, representatives of the Polish Government, the Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia Armin Laschet, ambassadors and diplomats, representatives of the clergy, regional authorities, local governments, employees of museums and memorial sites.
In 2019, we will commemorate the 75th anniversary of the creation of the railway siding inside the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp along with the unloading and selection ramp, which extended almost to the gas chambers and crematoria II and III. From mid-May 1944, it received transports of Jews from Hungary, Slovakia, the ghettos of Litzmannstadt and Theresienstadt among others, deported by the Germans for immediate extermination. It was also a stop for transports carrying Poles from insurgent Warsaw, sent to Auschwitz via the transit camp in Pruszków. Consequently, the visual symbol of the anniversary was the work of former Auschwitz prisoner Adam Brandhuber “The arrival of the transport to the ramp”.
During the comemmoration event, two former prisoners of the camp took to the floor: Janina Iwańska and Leon Weintraub.
Janina Iwańska was born on 12 June 1930, in Warsaw. She was deported to Auschwitz by the Germans from the Warsaw Uprising. During the evacuation of the camp, she was first transferred to the Ravensbrück camp, and then to Neustadt-Glewe.
'Anyone who enters the site of the camp in Birkenau passes by a wagon standing on the ramp. For the majority, it is merely a freight wagon that carried prisoners to the concentration camp. For me, this wagon is associated with something else. I saw this wagon for the first time in 1942 while travelling through Treblinka on vacation to my grandmother. People were sitting there, either already dead or waiting for death,' she said.
Recalling her deportation to Auschwitz in 1944, she said: 'When I got out of the wagon; I sensed a familiar smell from Treblinka, the smell of burnt bodies. I knew the same fate as those in Treblinka awaited me. With this mindset, I entered the building, where our hair was cut to the bare skin. After a bath, we were given striped uniforms and marked with a number and red triangle badge with the letter P, which indicated that we were political prisoners from Poland. I received the number 85595. Through a column of children, we were led to the children’s block,' she recalled.
All images in the article: Jarosław Praszkiewicz