We apologize for any inconvenience. The vast majority of Polish Jews - victims of Auschwitz - perished anonymously with estimated figures ranging from , to , Most Polish Jews were murdered elsewhere: in the extermination centers of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek, as well as in mass executions nearby or in their places of living.
Police grabbed Poles off streets and trains, from marketplaces and churches, and in raids on villages and neighborhoods to fill labor quotas. German officials sent Poles who tried to avoid labor conscription to concentration camps and punished their families. Between and , at least 1. Hundreds of thousands were also imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. We were, of course, survivors of a period in which every able bodied person, age 14 and up, had to work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.
Otherwise, we would be shipped to Germany to forced-labor camps or to work in factories of the German war machine. Nazi officials conducted indiscriminate retaliatory measures in response to resistance activities. They answered attacks on Germans with mass arrests and executions of civilians and regularly held civilians as hostages to be shot in reprisal for resistance operations. A Polish government-in-exile, led by Wladyslaw Sikorski, was established in France and moved to London after France fell.
It was represented on Polish soil by the underground "Delegatura," which had as one of its functions the coordination of the activities of the Polish Home Army Armia Krajowa. The Polish resistance staged a violent mass uprising against the Germans in Warsaw in August The rebellion lasted two months but was eventually crushed by the Germans. More than , Poles were killed in the uprising. Someone wearing a gas mask would pour the crystals through a small opening into the sealed gas chamber filled with victims.
Jews lived in Poland for years before the Nazi occupation. On the eve of the occupation 3. After the conquest of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in September , most of the Jews remaining within the area occupied by Germany — approximately 1. In June , after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans began to imprison the rest of Polish Jewry in ghettos and to deport them to concentration and slave labor camps.
In December the murder of the Jews from the Lodz ghetto began in Chelmno with gas vans. Murder of Polish Jews in Auschwitz began in March After the basic guidelines for action were formulated at the Wannsee Conference , between March and July the Germans established three death camps in Poland Operation Reinhard close to main rail lines: Belzec , Sobibor and Treblinka.
With the arrival of the deportation trains, the victims — men, women, and children — were sent straight to their deaths in the gas chambers. On July 22, , on the eve of the Ninth of Av in the Jewish calendar, the Germans began the mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto.
By the time they ended on September 21, Yom Kippur, some , inhabitants of the ghetto had been deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. And any version of past events that purports definitively to clarify good vs. A case in point is the public outcry over new legislation in Poland that would criminalize perceived attacks on Polish actions during World War II. This misrepresentation appears to attribute responsibility to the Polish government or its people for these sites of imprisonment, torture, and murder.
A clear-eyed look at the facts demonstrates that the record of Christian Poles, amid the German occupation and the crimes of the Holocaust perpetrated in their country, is not uniformly one of complicity or innocence. Poland was the victim of German aggression, suffering one of the most brutal occupation regimes among countries in the Nazi orbit.
Despite severe penalties, more Christian Poles have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations—those who risked their lives to aid Jews—than citizens of any other country in Europe. But many others supported and enabled Germany in its campaign to exterminate the Jews.
Prior to World War II, anti-Semitism was an increasingly visible factor in Polish society, and government authorities took formal measures to exclude Jews from key sectors of public life. The modern country of Poland was a new one established in the aftermath of the First World War, and during the s and 30s it was still struggling to define its ideological footing and identity. A nationalism deeply rooted in Catholicism was central to that struggle. It was against this fractious backdrop that the country found itself in a devastating war.
Following the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September , the country was divided between those two occupiers. The Nazi goal was to decapitate Polish society, thereby reducing the chance of meaningful resistance by eliminating the groups most likely to lead it. At least 1.
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