News
International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
The day of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Auschwitz, which falls on 27 January, was established as International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust in 2005. Among the Polish prisoners-of-war, there were also many Jews. The fate of many of them was tragic.
As a matter of fact, many Polish citizens of Jewish origin served in the Polish Army in the pre-war period - after all, the army reflected the social structure of a multinational, ethnically and culturally diverse state. Some 60,000 Jews were taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht. The extermination awaited mainly privates and non-commissioned officers, who were sent from the stalags to the ghettos, eventually dying in droves along with their families in mass extermination operations. Incomparably more likely to survive were the officers who were held in German oflags. They survived the war, but they still did not manage to avoid unpleasantness.