Page 28 - Witness: Passing the Torch of Holocaust Memory to New Generations

The Auschwitz camp complex, built on the site of former army barracks in the Silesian district of Poland, consisted of Auschwitz I (Main Camp), Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau), and Auschwitz III (Monowitz and the subcamps). Auschwitz I was constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of prison- ers took place in September 1941, and Auschwitz II-Birkenau went on to become a major site of Operation Reinhard, the Nazi “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews from all over occupied Europe to the camp’s gas chambers, where they were killed with the pesticide Zyklon B. At least 1.1 million prisoners died at Auschwitz, almost 90 percent of them Jewish; approximately one in six Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. More than one-third of all Jews murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau were of Hungarian origin – the largest of any single group. In mid-1944 and less than a year to the end of the war, within a period of only 10 weeks, approximately 400,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the majority of whom went directly to the gas chambers.
AUSCHWITZ-
Students visiting Auschwitz left roses on the barbed wire, which was electrified to prevent prisoner escapes.
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