Tarnow, Poland – Train Retraces Auschwitz Death Route

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    Participants in the ceremony laid flowers at the monument to the First Transport Photo: TVPTarnow, Poland – Exactly 70 years after German troops packed hundreds of Poles into cattle cars, survivors and relatives have retraced the route of the first rail convoy to Auschwitz.

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    A special memorial train set off on Monday morning from the southern Polish town of Tarnow, retracing the original 140km route to Oswiecim, site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

    Before embarking, participants paid tribute at a monument unveiled on the platform, inscribed with the names of the 728 prisoners sent from a jail in Tarnow to the camp on June 14, 1940.

    A total of 1.1 million people perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II, according to figures from the camp’s memorial museum.

    One million were Jews from Poland and across Nazi-occupied Europe. The camp is an enduring symbol of the Holocaust.

    The other victims included some 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and up to 15,000 others including resistance members from other occupied nations.

    “They told us we were being sent to a concentration camp, but none of us knew then what a concentration camp was,” Kazimierz Zajac, an 86-year-old survivor of the convoy, told AFP.

    On arrival, the Nazis tattooed numbers onto their arms. Zajac still bears his, 261.

    The captors’ message was stark, Zajac recalled: “Jews won’t live for more than a month, priests for three months and for the others, the only way out is up the crematorium chimney”.

    The Nazis set up Auschwitz in a former Polish army barracks in 1940, the year after sparking World War II by invading Poland.

    Later expanded into a purpose-built death camp for Jews, the site’s initial role was to hold and kill Poland’s elites and stem underground resistance to the brutal Nazi occupation.

    Many of the men on the original convoy were captured trying to escape to join a Polish exile army in France, after Germany invaded in September 1939.

    Among them was Kazimierz Albin, now 87, snared in January 1940 trying to cross into Slovakia, a Nazi ally.

    As in 1940, Monday’s train stopped in the city of Krakow. It was there that the prisoners learned that the Germans had just conquered Paris.

    “It was like the ground fell away beneath our feet. Our goal had been France and joining the Polish army there, and now Paris was occupied and France had surrendered,” Albin told AFP in a recent interview.

    After suffering beatings and torture, the inmates were put to work as forced labourers extending the camp.

    Nearby Birkenau opened in early 1942, and its gas chambers became the hub of the “Final Solution”, the Nazi genocide of six million Jews across Europe.

    Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945.

    Three hundred men from the first convoy survived the war.


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    5 Comments
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    Anonymous
    Anonymous
    13 years ago

    What a great idea for a vacation! Come experience the Aushwitz Death Route you and your whole family. No doubt this will be a top seller.

    HaNavon
    HaNavon
    13 years ago

    Boirei Oilem, Tarnovshek, this is right next to Rozvadov, Galitzia, where my elte zeide and bubbe came from.
    Sad 🙁

    yankle
    yankle
    13 years ago

    my dead parents lived there, darf suggen a kadish

    Anonymous
    Anonymous
    13 years ago

    HaNavon #2 , I was just in Rozvadov & Turbia – shoot me an email (rozvadovturbia gmail.com) to see if family member of mine from there remembers yours?

    sharon
    sharon
    13 years ago

    How do I get a hold of the list of names? My father’s family originated from Tarnow and my grandfather and one uncle were part of the first transport.