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Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
27 January, the anniversary of liberating the German Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-
Birkenau, marks International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the
Holocaust, officially proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in 2005.
The former concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau remains one of the most important
symbols of Holocaust remembrance. Together with thousands of graves, monuments and
memorial sites across the world, it is a testament to the atrocious crimes and a tribute to their
victims.
The first transport arrived at Auschwitz on 14 June 1940. It was made up of Polish political
prisoners. The decision to transfer them to Auschwitz was dictated by mass arrests of Poles
and the resultant overcrowding of prisons in German-occupied Poland.
Two years later, the camp became one of the centres used for the implementation of the
Endlösung der Judenfrage (the “final solution to the Jewish question”) – the Nazi plan to
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murder Jews who inhabited the areas occupied by Nazi Germany. The Auschwitz-Birkenau
camp was where 1–1.5m people were murdered, a million of them Jewish. Many were citizens
of the Republic of Poland. Terror also reigned in hundreds of other concentration camps across
Germany, allied Axis states and in areas occupied by them, in ghettos as well as during
executions carried out on the streets of many European villages and towns. It is estimated that
6m Jews were killed during World War II. The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was
liberated on 27 January 1945 after the Red Army entered occupied Poland.
The death of millions of Jews will always be a shame for humankind. After the tragedy of such
monstrous proportions, our faith in humanity is restored by the stories of men and women,
Poles among them, who saved Jews from the Holocaust. Guided by their sense of shared
human solidarity, the Polish Government-in-Exile and thousands of our fellow citizens were
involved in helping Jews during the Second World War. It must be remembered that the
punishment for doing so in German-occupied Poland was the death penalty. Poles account for
the largest group among the Righteous Among the Nations, a title bestowed by Yad Vashem’s
Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. Operating under the auspices of the
Polish Government-in-Exile, the Council to Aid Jews "Żegota" was the only state organization
in occupied Europe established specifically to save Jews.
Also Polish diplomats were involved in saving Jews. Thanks to the operations of the so-called
Ładoś Group, several hundred Jews from the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Austria, France,
Slovakia and other European countries were saved from death in 1942–1943.