"In their tens of thousands, from all the sub-camps of Auschwitz, the masses were dragged day and night, night and day, with no rest or break… and the Germans guarding the marchers…strew their path with gunfire. Those who lagged behind were shot, and the snow engulfed their skeletal corpses."
(Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra)
In a Christian cemetery in the village of Książenice, Poland, about an hour-and-a-half from Auschwitz-Birkenau, a memorial presides over a mass grave of 45 people, victims of a death march that left Auschwitz-Birkenau. Unlike many other victims of death marches, they received a burial. The local priest, Pawel Rys, made the decision to bury the victims and also to document their 'names' – the inmate numbers tattooed on their arms. The priest instructed the gravedigger to record the numbers. The original document is stored in the Auschwitz Archive and a copy is on display in the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem.
Together with the thousands of other inmates in the death march, they departed from Auschwitz-Birkenau on 18 January 1945. The inmates received a piece of bread, one portion of canned food between four and a blanket. They were forced to walk tens of kilometers in the freezing cold wearing rags and trudging through the snow in wooden clogs. They suffered from exhaustion and dysentery, eating handfuls of snow to ease their hunger. Anyone who became weak and dropped behind was immediately shot by the SS. After a march of approximately 59 km they arrived at a train station in the city of Gliwice, where 100-150 men were crowded into open train carriages. They were transported for hours in the extreme cold of -20°C and many of them froze to death. When the train stopped, the SS guards continued to march the men, who had not received food for three days. On 22 January the prisoners neared the forest by the settlements of Mlyny and Rybnik. As they entered the forest the guards began to shout that they were being attacked by partisans and opened fire. The site was filled with dead and injured. Residents of Mlyny used wagons to transport some of the corpses for burial in Książenice cemetery. Their funerals were held on 26 January and 12 February.
The mass grave site was known to researchers and to some Polish tour guides. The initial idea, to try to identify the victims by means of the numbers engraved on the gravestone and to erect an additional gravestone which would list their names, was raised following a visit by the Israel Security Agency. Yad Vashem joined this important initiative, in keeping with the fundamental tenet, "Unto every person there is a name" (Yad Vashem Law, 1953. Clause 2: The task of Yad Vashem is to gather in to the homeland material regarding all those members of the Jewish people who laid down their lives, who fought and rebelled against the Nazi enemy and his collaborators, and to perpetuate their memory.). Even today, over 75 years after the Holocaust, Yad Vashem continues its mission to restore the names and life stories of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.
Initial research in the Auschwitz Archive revealed that 26 of the buried were Jews, from Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, The Netherlands, Poland and Hungary. Five of the buried were Polish political prisoners and the others were of varied nationalities. It seems that some of the inmate numbers were copied inaccurately and their information conflicts with other sources.
Thus far, 16 of the Jews buried at the site have been identified. The research has been conducted through the use of information sources already available in the Yad Vashem Archive; Pages of Testimony, community records, memorial books, etc. and so too, through additional archives in Poland, France and The Netherlands. Through these sources we have succeeded in building the life stories for a significant proportion of those Jews whose names were identified.
We appeal to anyone with a connection to the death marches or their victims, if you have any additional information about the people or of their families, please pass it on to Yad Vashem. This will be a significant contribution to the important work of revealing the names and faces of Holocaust victims.
