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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.