80 years ago, they sent the first transport to concentration camps: Trains full of girls, Slovakia broke the imaginary bottom – Topky.sk

“The transports were planned in advance and the representatives of the Slovak state argued on them as early as 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,” said Matej. Lamb from the Holocaust Museum in Sered. Slovakia was the only country that paid for the extermination of its own citizens. Deportation fees came from confiscated Jewish property, so Slovak Jews actually “prepaid” their deaths. The state paid a total of 200 million Slovak crowns at the time through a clearing account, which was transferred to the Reichsmark. The Nazis were notorious for their cynicism. Despite the fact that the Jews were already dead, they argued over the increase in the contribution, because the money was not enough to settle and retrain the deportees. Photo gallery (3) Source: profimedia.sk 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, 57,752 Jewish fellow citizens were deported, who ended up in Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Only hundreds of them managed to survive. Photo gallery (3) Auschwitz
Source: ÚPN The first victim of solving the Jewish question “My father did not hide me and my youngest sister with the words: ‘What such children will not take.’ 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 the 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. “Above all, this tragedy has shown how far the systematic and targeted persecution of the Jewish population can result. It began with verbal attacks that grew into an official, state-run anti-Jewish policy after the establishment of the Slovak state. “said Beránek. Slovakia breaks the bottom By starting transports of the Jewish population to extermination camps during World War II, Slovakia has broken the imaginary bottom. This was stated by the Slovak historian Ivan Kamenec at the conference on the occasion of the anniversary. “From a historical, but especially from a moral point of view, it was a step by which the Slovak Republic at that time fatally and irrevocably broke through the bottom of its systematic and brutal anti-Semitic policy.