Piotr Setkiewicz: I prigionieri polacchi ad Auschwitz

Poles were, apart from Jews, the second-largest nationality group among prisoners of Auschwitz. They were also the first ones to reach the camp in spring of 1940. Unfortunately, those facts are frequently ignored by many western scholars. In numerous studies Polish victims of Auschwitz are being placed not only after Jews, but also Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah witnesses, into category of ?others?. Some authors used to notice them only at the moment of foundation of the camp; occasionally they add a little more information: that the Poles were partisans, Nazi opponents or members of leading class in the society. Since they constituted a constant threat to the occupation regime - isolating them in such places as concentration camps might have been justified somehow.

Paradoxically, a similar approach was adopted by Polish historians in their attempt to build a heroic picture of the nation unified in resisting against German occupants. From this perspective Polish prisoners of Auschwitz were simply resistance fighters, underground soldiers, who just continued their battles behind barbed wires of the concentration camp. Most likely for this reason the symbol of the ?Grunwald Distinguished Cross? (a military decoration) was put on the central part of the memorial in Birkenau. The survivors themselves in their past-war testimonies usually accepted this explanation, even if they were not fully aware what the actual reason of their imprisonment was. However careful analyses of the camp registers provide different results: most of the prisoners were arrested not for their membership in underground organizations but for minor offenses against regulations introduced by the Germans in occupied Poland; many others were simply captured during street roundups.