80 years have passed since the first deportation of Slovak Jews TVNOVINY.sk – TVNOVINY.sk

At the memorial at the railway station in Poprad, we commemorate the tragedy of Slovak Jews every year about this time, and so it will be this morning. This is because the first transport of Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, which was built near the Polish city of Auschwitz, was sent from the Poprad railway station. Today (March 25) will be 80 years since the beginning of the deportations of Slovak Jews to Nazi concentration camps. “The transports were planned in advance and the representatives of the Slovak state argued for them in the autumn of 1941 and began to organize them from the beginning of 1942. The Slovak state organized them voluntarily and paid 500 Reichsmarks to Nazi Germany for every deported Jew,” TASR said. Matej Beránek from the Holocaust Museum in Sered. The first transport to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp was sent from the railway station in Poprad on March 25, 1942 at 8.20 pm. 999 young women and girls, mostly from the Šarišsko-Zemplín County, were forced to board the wagons intended for the transport of cattle. The next day, in the afternoon, the death train arrived at the concentration camp. This marked the beginning of the first wave of transports from Slovakia, which lasted until October 20, 1942. During it, 57 transports were dispatched, while 57,752 Jewish fellow citizens were deported, who ended up in Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Only hundreds of them survived. “My father didn’t hide me and my youngest sister with the words, ‘What, kids won’t take it anyway.’ On Saturday morning, a firefighter came to me from a side street, but in a guard uniform. diabetic shock. Until then, I didn’t know what it was. Her sister just shouted, ‘Help, help!’ “We didn’t have anything. We just ran there. She was dead by morning. She was the first victim of solving the so-called Jewish question,” Matilda Hrabovecká recalled these tragic events. The second wave of deportations of Slovak Jews began after the occupation of Slovakia by Nazi troops. The first transport was sent on September 30, 1944 from Sered. By the end of March 1945, another approximately 13,500 Jews had been deported. “This tragedy, which took place eight decades ago, showed above all how far a systematic and targeted persecution of the Jewish population could result. It began with verbal attacks that grew into an official, state-run anti-Jewish policy after the establishment of the Slovak state. It resulted in these deportations. , which meant the physical liquidation of most of the deportees, “said Beránek.