The Horrifying And Painful Death Of Czeslawa Kwoka, Just For Being A Polish.
Her name was Czeslawa Kwoka, and her crime was being Polish, Catholic, and 14 years old. Her red triangle was for political prisoners, because of where she was born in Poland.
After this photo was taken, she was killed in Auschwitz extermination camp on March 12, 1943 with a phenol injection in the heart. Just before the execution, she was photographed by prisoner Wilhelm Brasse, who would later testify against the executioner of Czeslawa, a woman.
Just before the photo, the executioner punched Czeslawa in the face, as the hematoma on her lip shows. This is the face of a terrified little girl, who didn't even speak the language of her executioner.
She had lost her mother a few days before. But she dried her tears to look presentable for the photo. They took her hair and her life, but they couldn’t take her dignity.
She was only one of about 250,000 children and minors who were executed in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
This is what happens when hatred is cultivated in a nation and thugs gain control. If you don’t think could happen here, you need to read Gulag Archipelago.
More Details
Czesława Kwoka (15 August 1928 – 12 March 1943) was a Polish Catholic girl who was murdered at the age of 14 in Auschwitz. One of the thousands of minor child and teen victims of German World War II war crimes against ethnic Poles in German-occupied Poland, she is among those memorialized in an Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum exhibit, "Block no. 6: Exhibition: The Life of the Prisoners.
Photographs of Kwoka and others, taken by the "famous photographer of Auschwitz", Wilhelm Brasse , between 1940 and 1945, are displayed in the Museum's photographic memorial. Brasse discusses several of the photographs in The Portraitist, a 2005 television documentary about him. They became a focus of interviews with him that have been cited in various articles and books.
Personal background
Czesława Kwoka was born in Wólka Złojecka, a small village in Poland, to a Catholic mother, Katarzyna Kwoka (née Matwiejczuk), and a father named Paweł who probably died when she was little, with his last residence at Wólka Złojecka.
Along with her mother (prisoner number 26946), Czesława Kwoka (prisoner number 26947) was deported from her village, and transported from a resettlement camp at Zamość, General Government, to Auschwitz, on 13 December 1942, during Aktion Zamosc which was initiated in November that year to create Lebensraum for Germans in eastern Europe.
On 12 March 1943, less than a month after her mother's death on 18 February, Kwoka was murdered at the age of 14; the circumstances of her death were not recorded.[1] Her death certificate, issued on 23 March, falsely noted that she died of cachexia from intestinal catarrh. However, reports indicate that the cause of death was a phenol injection to the heart.
General historical contexts of child victims of Auschwitz
Czesława Kwoka was one of the "approximately 230,000 children and young people aged less than eighteen" among the 1,300,000 people who were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1940 to 1945.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum's Centre for Education About the Holocaust and Auschwitz documents the wartime circumstances that brought young adults and children like Kwoka to the concentration camps in its 2004 publication of an album of photographs compiled by its historian Helena Kubica; these photographs were first published in the Polish/German version of Kubica's book in 2002.
According to the Museum, of the approximately 230,000 children and young people deported to Auschwitz, more than 216,000 children, the majority, were of Jewish descent; more than 11,000 children came from Romani families; the other children (~3,000) had Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Russian, or other ethnic backgrounds.
Most of these children "arrived in the camp along with their families as part of the various operations that the Nazis carried out against whole ethnic or social groups"; these operations targeted "the Jews as part of the drive for the total extermination of the Jewish people, the Gypsies as part of the effort to isolate and destroy the
Gypsy population, the Poles in connection with the expulsion and deportation to the camp of whole families from the Zamość region and from Warsaw during the Uprising there in August 1944", as well as Belarusians and other citizens of the Soviet Union "in reprisal for partisan resistance" in places occupied by Germany.
Of all these children and young people, "Only slightly more than 20,000 ... including 11,000 Gypsies, were entered in the camp records. No more than 650 of them survived until liberation [in 1945].
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