Memorial plaque for the deported Jews of Breslau

Tablica upamiętniająca deportację Żydów z Wrocławia

Since April 2018, a memorial plaque in the hall of the Wrocław railway station Dworzec Nadodrze commemorates the over 7.000 Jews of Breslau who were deported from this railway station into ghettos, camps and extermination sites.

History

In the mid-1920s, Breslau (since 1945 Wrocław) was home to the third-largest Jewish community in the German Reich – after Berlin and Frankfurt – with 23,240 members. From January 1933 on, Hitler and the NSDAP declared it their aim to expel all Jews from Germany. As everywhere, extensive anti-Jewish measures were implemented in Breslau: from operations such as the state-controlled »boycott of Jews« on April 1, 1933, to open violence, when members of the SA set fire to the New Synagogue on night of November 9/10, 1938. The New Synagogue, located on Am Anger 8, had been consecrated in 1872 and could seat 2,000 people. After the events of the »Kristallnacht«, the Gestapo arrested 2,471 Jewish men and deported them to the Buchenwald concentration camp. In mid-May 1939, there were only about 11,200 Jews left in Breslau. At this point, 2,000 Jews from Breslau were deported to the transit camps in Tormersdorf near Görlitz, Grüssau near Landeshut and Riebnig near Brieg. The persecution measures reached a peak on November 25, 1941, when 1,005 Jews were deported to Kaunas. There, three days upon arrival, all of the deportees were shot by the Lithuanian Einsatzkommando 3 (mobile killing squad) at the Ninth Fort. Further transports from Breslau were headed to the Distrikt Lublin in Poland, to the Theresienstadt ghetto and to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the turn of 1944/45, transports left for the Groß-Rosen concentration camp and its satellite camps. The deportation trains all left from a side track of the Odertor train station. Prior to their deportation, the victims were gathered by the Nazi authorities in the nearby premises of the popular beer garden Schießwerder.

Wrocław, 2018, The former Odertor railway station, Generalkonsulat Breslau

Breslau, 1938, The department store Wertheim, opened in 1930, was considered as Jewish by the Nazis, public domain

Victims

Between 1941 and 1944, the Gestapo and the SS deported over 7,000 Jewish men, women and children from the Breslau Odertor railway station to the German extermination and concentration camps in the occupied east. Hundreds of Breslau Jews committed suicide or died in concentration camps or forced labour detachments. Thousands were expelled from their Silesian home town between 1933 and 1941; about 1,000 survivors were expelled in 1945 or forcibly resettled by the Polish authorities in the following years. Altogether it is estimated that about 10,000 Jews of Breslau were killed in the Holocaust.

The Second World War began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the occupation of the west of the country by German troops and the east of the country by the Red Army. Persecution and terror directly followed the invasion in both parts of the country. German units massacred members of the intelligentsia, Jewish and non-Jewish civilians as well as hospital patients. At the end of 1939 the German administration established ghettos where the Jewish population was forced to live in cramped and horrendous conditions. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, eastern Poland also fell under German control. SS Einsatzgruppen started to systematically murder Jewish men, later also women and children. In autumn 1941, local German authorities in the former west of the country began to prepare for the mass murder of Jewish ghetto prisoners using poison gas. By 1945, some three million Polish Jews had been murdered in the extermination camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek or Auschwitz, starved to death in the ghettos or shot dead. In 1943 the Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto staged an uprising, which was brutally crushed by the SS. Polish soldiers fought with the Allies on all fronts during the Second World War. Polish partisan groups, including the patriotic »Armia Krajowa« (Home Army), formed the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe. August 1, 1944 saw the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the most extensive civilian campaign against the Germans in occupied Europe. It failed also because the Red Army, already standing on the opposite side of the Vistula River, chose not to intervene. It is estimated that up to 250,000 people lost their lives in the uprising. A total of around three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death during the German occupation. Once the Red Army had arrived on (East) Polish soil in January 1944, the troops of the Armia Krajowa were stripped of their weapons by the Soviet secret service and the officers were either shot or deported. The millions of deaths during the occupation, the permanent Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the incorporation of former eastern German territories and the ensuing population transfers all left a traumatic political and social legacy in Poland. Remembrance of the murder of European Jews in German extermination camps was initially marginalised in the Polish culture of memory. Although Auschwitz soon became an international symbol of the Holocaust, in Poland it was viewed for decades above all as a »site of Polish martyrdom«. However, the start of the 21st century brought about changes in this respect, due in part to the fierce debates over the Jedwabne massacre in eastern Poland. The massacre of around 340 Jews on July 10, 1941 was originally attributed to the »Gestapo and Hitler police« but had in fact been carried out by Polish »neighbours« without orders from the Germans. Debates in Poland and abroad on Polish perpetration resulted in the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (*1954) issuing an apology to the victims in 2001. There were increasing calls from experts, such as those from Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance, for the country to confront the most difficult chapters in its history, which also include the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1946-47 and state anti-semitism in communist Poland during the post-war period. The Polish invests extensively in memorial culture, including grand projects with international ambition. The Warsaw Rising Museum was opened already in 2004. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in 2013 on the territory of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new museum dedicated specifically to the Warsaw Ghetto will follow suit in 2024. Since 2017, there is a major Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Since the turn of the millennium, the sites of the former German extermination camps have also been converted into modern memorial sites. An ever-growing preoccupation with Poland’s Jewish and multicultural heritage can be observed in the field of culture as well.

Remembrance

After heavy bombing and artillery fire by the Soviets, the besieged and fortified city of Breslau surrendered on May 6, 1945. About 1,000 German Jews, Holocaust survivors, were still in Breslau or had returned to the city from the camps. As a result of the Potsdam Agreement, concluded in the summer of 1945, Silesia was now »under Polish administration«. Just like the rest of the German population, the German Jews were expelled by the new authorities. Also, most of the 90,000 Polish Jews who settled after the war in Wrocław and Lower Silesia had emigrated by 1948.
After the collapse of Communism there has been growing interest in the German and also the Jewish past of the city. The small Jewish community is one of the most active in Poland. Moreover, there are numerous international projects to research the Jewish past of Breslau/ Wrocław and spread knowledge about it.
On April 13, 2018, a new memorial plaque was inaugurated in the hall of the former Odertor railway station to commemorate the victims of the deportations. Today, the train station is called Dworzec Nadodrze and still has regional significance. The initiative for the memorial sign was taken by the Silesian Museum in Görlitz and was supported by the City Museum Wrocław and by the local Jewish community. At the inauguration ceremony, representatives of the German General Consulate were also present as well as Rita Kratzenberg, who, born in Breslau in 1942 and motivated by her own family's history, has been fighting for such a memorial sign for over fifteen years.
The inscription of the memorial plaque reads in Polish, German, English and Hebrew: »From this railway station in the years 1941–1944, the German Nazi regime deported over 7,000 Jews from Wrocław and other Silesian towns to concentration camps and places of extermination: Kowno, Izbica, Majdanek, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Belzec, Riga, Minsk and others. The vast majority of deportees were murdered.«

Breslau, probably end of November 1941, Jews in a beer garden used as a »final collection point« before being deported from the nearby Odertorbahnhof station, Yad Vashem

Wrocław, 2018, Memorial plaque for the deported Jews, Generalkonsulat Breslau

Open

The memorial plaque is located in the hall of the railway station Dworzec Nadodrze and is always accessible.

Contact

plac Staszica 50
50-223 Wrocław

Wrocław, 2018, Memorial plaque in the main hall of the railway station, Wochenblatt, Marie Baumgarten

Wrocław, 2018, Platform at the railway station, Generalkonsulat Breslau

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