Organized by the Greater Poland Martyrdom Museum and the parish of Christ the Good Shepherd, the annual observance began at 4 a.m. at a church and ends at the former camp’s death wall.
Museum director Jacek Kaczmarek said the early hour, cold and sometimes rain made the service demanding, but added that it was held in a place of singular weight.
“We walk the same route the prisoners took: from the gate, through all the corridors, into the courtyard, past the stairs of death, past the gas chamber, past the death cell where prisoners were hanged, to the death wall”, he said.
He said the sites linked to prisoners’ deaths also serve as stations of the cross.
Kaczmarek said the gathering before dawn, in cold and silence, made a powerful impression not only on relatives of victims. Special reflections are prepared each year for the site, he added.
Calling participation in the service an important element of Greater Poland tradition, he said that while recalling Christ’s martyrdom, worshippers would also turn their thoughts to the thousands murdered in what he called the “Golgotha of Greater Poland”.
Fort VII, originally called Konzentrationslager Posen, was opened by the Germans on Oct. 10, 1939, and was the first German concentration camp on Polish soil.
During World War Two, it became the largest center for the extermination of Polish elites in the Greater Poland region. Prisoners included academics, cultural figures, officials, teachers, priests, political and social activists, businesspeople, landowners and veterans of the Greater Poland and Silesian uprisings. From spring 1940, members of the Polish underground were also jailed there.
Officially described as a prison and transit camp for civilians, Fort VII was in practice primarily an extermination camp. German occupiers used gas there for the first time in the mass murder of civilians, setting up a test gas chamber in October 1939 using carbon monoxide.
Victims of those tests included several hundred patients from a psychiatric hospital in Owińska and from the psychiatric ward of Poznań University’s neurological-psychiatric clinic.
The exact number of prisoners held at Fort VII is unknown and estimated at between several thousand and 40,000. At least about 4,500 people died there or perished in the camp, while many thousands more were killed in mass executions near Poznań.
Kaczmarek said the fort’s history remained too little known, not only in Poland but even in Poznań.
“We are trying to bring more people to this place, to spread knowledge about what happened here,” he said, adding that visitor numbers had risen over the past two years, especially among individual foreign tourists and school groups.
(jh)
Source: PAP