The observances in southern Poland earlier this month included a religious service at the St. Maximilian Centre in the village of Harmęże, near the former Auschwitz camp, state news agency PAP reported.
June 14, 1940, when the first transport of 728 Poles arrived from a prison in the city of Tarnów, is widely considered the date Auschwitz began operating.
Among those attending were several Auschwitz survivors, including Janusz Rudnicki, who was deported to the camp during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, according to the PAP news agency.
“This is my first time attending such a ceremony,” he told reporters. “I meet with young people from time to time to speak about Auschwitz, but what I share is just a drop in the ocean of what could be conveyed.”
Auschwitz Museum Director Piotr Cywiński called the memory preserved by survivors "perhaps the greatest work of their lives" and a gift to new generations.
He added: “Every year on June 14, I think of those Polish survivors who have helped create this place of remembrance. It is thanks to them that we can reflect more wisely and maturely on our choices today.”
Piotr Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. Photo: PAP/Łukasz Gągulski
In a homily during the Mass, Bishop Roman Pindel of the Bielsko-Żywiec Roman Catholic Diocese reflected on the infamous inscription on the camp’s gate, “Arbeit macht frei” (Work Sets You Free), contrasting it with the biblical message that “the truth will set you free.”
He described the Nazi slogan as a cynical distortion used to deceive and demoralize prisoners subjected to forced labour and inhumane conditions.
“Those who ended up in the camp quickly learned that the only true freedom came through death—through the chimney,” Pindel said.
He added that the slogan on the gate was a symbol of the ideological perversion and cruelty of the Nazi regime.
Following the Mass, survivors, government officials and local dignitaries laid wreaths and lit candles at the Death Wall in Auschwitz I, where many prisoners were executed.
The Polish national anthem was played in tribute, the PAP news agency reported.
Earlier in the day, flowers were laid at a plaque on the former Małopolska State College building, where the first deportees were briefly held in a basement before the camp was ready.
On June 14, 1940, Nazi Germany sent the first group of Polish prisoners—including soldiers, resistance members and youth activists—to Auschwitz. Of the 728 deported, only 239 are known to have survived the war.
In total, around 150,000 Poles were imprisoned in Auschwitz. Half were killed there or later in other camps.
Auschwitz became the largest Nazi death camp, where more than 1.1 million people—mostly Jews—were murdered, along with Poles, Roma, Soviet POWs, and others.
The camp was liberated by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945.
In Poland, June 14 is observed as the National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of German Nazi Concentration Camps and Death Camps.
(gs)
Source: IAR, PAP