This image shows the first Polish male prisoners to be shipped to Auschwitz, being marched to the train station in Tarnów. Among them would be Zbigniew Zasadzki, a Roman Catholic shopkeeper.
If one had to select the bravest hero of World War II, certainly the Polish whistleblowers Witold Pilecki and Jerzy Tabeau would be prime candidates for that title, along with Rudolf Vrba. The Polish people suffered immensely and catastrophically during World War II.
The Polish Institute of National Remembrances claims almost as many Polish non-Jews were killed during the German occupation as Polish Jews. The “Polish” death toll has been estimated to be at around five-and-and-a-half million; a 2009 study has raised that estimate slightly. Such estimates are controversial. The ‘paper trail’ for Jews in concentration camps is irrefutable; whereas the ‘paper trail’ for Poles is scanty. While Jews have been continually obliged to reduce their estimates of how many Jews were murdered; the Poles are not subject to similar pressures when their tallies for Polish victims continue to rise.
The testimony database of the Witold Pilecki Institute of Solidarity and Valor in Warsaw contains many accounts of Poles who suffered in Auschwitz—but many Poles were also complicit in the Nazi agenda to eliminate Jews. Hence, the ability of institutions such as the Auschwitz Holocaust Museum to impartially present the uncompromising truth about all aspects of the Holocaust must be suspect, in the same way that Yad Vashem in Jerusalem cannot be entirely trusted to present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the Holocaust.
Convicted Polish war criminal Paul Szczurek
Meanwhile, it remains an enormous psychological burden for all Jews globally to wear the badge of genocide victimology and it remains an enormous cultural burden for Poland to be the “home” of the world’s most notorious murder centre. Both burdens are entirely undeserved.
The first transport of Polish male prisoners to Auschwitz, including some Catholic priests and Jews, was sent from Tarnów, approximately 56 miles east of Krakow, on June 13, 1940. They were accorded serial numbers from 13 to 758. Among them was prisoner # 293, Zbigniew Zasadzki. Born in Kraków on October 28, 1913, Zasadzki was a 27-year-old Roman Catholic shopkeeper. As one of the most veteran survivors of the Auschwitz camp, he later testified at the trial of a sadistic SS overseer named Paul Szczurek.
The Nazis considered the Poles to be ethnically inferior. Possibly this helps to explain why so some Poles accepted positions within the occupational forces that enabled them to mistreat the Jews as their inferiors. SS-Unterscharführer Paul Szczurek, for example, was an ethnic German sergeant within the Polish Army until 1939. He joined the SS in 1940 and was stationed in KZ Auschwitz where he became one of countless overseers who abused his power in order to humiliate female prisoners.
Zbigniew Zasadzki agreed to testify before a war crimes tribunal about Szczurek, a fellow Pole.
See his testimony below…
*
Zbigniew Zasadzki’s Testimony
Re: The Victimization of Poles
I was transported to the Auschwitz I concentration camp in the first transport of prisoners, that is, on 14 June 1940, and if my memory serves me right, I was incarcerated there until September 1943.
I don’t recall SS man Paweł [Paul] Szczurek from that period of time, but I remember him very well from the time when he held the post of a Blockführer and an SS man supervising the working brigades of prisoners of both sexes on leaving the camp in Birkenau for work. I saw many a time and from a short distance – I was standing next to him – how Szczurek, when counting pairs of female prisoners leaving for work, beat them with a stick or with his hands about the head or blindly all over the body, paying no heed to the effect of his blows. He would do it either for no reason at all or because some prisoner fell out of step or failed to keep pace. I also saw the SS men, Paul Szczurek among them, beat the female inmates with a stick on the buttocks and breasts and prod them with the stick at their intimate parts when the prisoners went stark naked to the bathhouse for delousing.
I very often saw Szczurek beat and kick a prisoner for no reason whatsoever or, for instance, for failure to take off his hat upon seeing Szczurek. Beating prisoners with his hands or any other object that he chanced upon, he never paid any heed to whether his blows landed on the head, nape, chest or any other body part. Szczurek was notorious for beating prisoners from behind, with a stick on the nape of the neck. I also saw and heard from my fellow inmates that Szczurek used a stick for whipping, and when he couldn’t find one he resorted to a level (waserwaga) and beat the prisoner not on the buttocks, but about the kidneys.
I was once involved in the following incident: when I was in one of the blocks in the women’s camp and talked to some woman, Szczurek noticed it, approached me and, shouting in German, demanded an explanation of why I was talking to that prisoner. When I told him that I didn’t understand what he was saying, Szczurek beat me forcefully with his hand in the face and stomach and kicked me, and then said to me in Polish, “Now you can speak Polish, you son of a bitch”. I heard from my fellow inmates (whose surnames I don’t recall at the moment) that Szczurek – when supervising with other SS men the loading of female prisoners who were to be transported in cars to the gas chambers – behaved in an inhumane manner, and tortured the women “just like a beast”, kicking and beating them blindly with a stick or a cane and forcing them into the cars.
When I mention prisoners who told me about this, I would like to explain that these prisoners worked in the bricklayers’ kommando, which was tasked with building washrooms and toilets in the blocks. They were Jews only, and 10 to 15 of them were always left in the block on purpose so that they could help in loading women, corpses or sick people onto the cars. I learned from my fellow inmates that Szczurek had the reputation of a “bastard” and sadist. My testimony concerns only these events from Birkenau that I witnessed or learned of myself during my stay in that camp from September 1943 to 28 October 1944.
*
Zbigniew Zasadzki identified Paul Szczurek as the SS man who chronically beat and tormented prisoners of both sexes, including himself. “I recognize him beyond a shadow of a doubt,” he said, “with the exception that he was slightly fatter back in the camp.”
At his trial in November of 1947, Szczurek declared that everything Zasadzki said about him was false, but former prisoners verified his cruelty, sadism and sexual perversion. For instance, a Polish butcher (by profession) named Bronisław Staszkiewicz, prisoner no. 1225, testified that, “From 25 June 1940 to 27 February 1943 I was a prisoner in the Auschwitz I concentration camp where I worked in the SS kitchen. At that time I met the defendant Paul Szczurek, who came to the kitchen for the so-called Sonderverpflegung. This allowance was only for those SS men who were engaged in escorting prisoners to the gas chambers as well as their gassing. What Sczurek’s role in the gassing of prisoners was, I don’t know. I saw how at the time when the prisoners were returning from work through the main gate and they were being inspected, Szczurek without any reason whatsoever beat and kicked them.”
The litany of accusations against Szczurek resulted in a guilty verdict on December 22, 1947.
Szczurek was hanged on January 24, 1948. See the video here.
JEWISH ARRIVALS, 1941
Auschwitz was not originally conceived as a murder factory to commit genocide against the Jews. The markings in blue [below] provide estimates as to how many Jews were brought to Auschwitz I prior to the full-scale implementation of the so-called Final Solution. These estimates were made by Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz based on the new arrivals list [Zugangslisten] that were uncovered for 1941 (only). A graduate of the Faculty of History at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Setkiewicz, (b. 1963) was director of Centre for Research at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum when the chart was made.
Jewish Arrivals to Auschwitz I in 1941