After Half a Year Determined to Death

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In December 1943 Pavel Oliva got to the transport in Terezín. He was brought to Auschwitz and was placed in the so-called family camp. In spring 1944 the prisoners had to write a letter to their relatives and though it was March 5, they had to write the date March 25. The Nazis told them they expect the delay of the post during the censorship which may arouse a suspicion at the addressees. Soon after that, the transport that arrived in September 1943 was transferred to the so-called quarantine camp and from there the prisoners were supposed to go to work in Heydebreck. Pavel Oliva soon found out that this step was motivated by completely different reasons. “We knew there are crematoriums, smoking chimneys and a lot of dying people. We did not want to believe the fact they gassed healthy people and from the very beginning we believed the prisoners were taken to Heydebreck.” Gradually Pavel Oliva got to know the cruel truth: “At night from the eighth to the ninth March, the prisoners from the September transport, including many of my relatives, were gassed. We got to know that all the prisoners from the family camp had a note in their files that they have a half year quarantine which meant they have to die after half a year.” Pavel Oliva managed to successfully get through the selection in June 1944 and so he escaped from death in a gas chamber.

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Family camp (BIIb) – part of the concentration camp Auschwitz II - Birkenau

The so-called Terezín's family camp (officially BIIb) was a part of the concentration camp Auschwitz II – Birkenau. From September 1943 to May 1944 six transports came to the family camp with 17,500 prisoners from the ghetto in Terezín. When the prisoners came to the camp they did not have to go through the selection, the families were not divided and the prisoners' heads were not shaved. This special treating was probably related to the effort of the Nazis to cover the genocide of the Jews during the visit of the delegation of International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in Terezín. But the exact reason for family camps is still a matter of debate. At night from the eighth to the ninth of March, 3,791 Jewish prisoners from the first transport (September 1943) from Terezín were gassed in gas chambers. In July 1944 the camp was closed down for good and its prisoners came through the selection. The prisoners able to work were transferred to other camps. Between the tenth and the twelfth of July the remaining 6,500 prisoners died in gas chambers. The liquidation of the prisoners from the family camp in the period from March to July 1944 was the biggest mass murders of Czechoslovaks during the Second World War.

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Auschwitz II-Birkenau

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Construction on the second of the three Auschwitz concentration camps began in October 1941 at the village of Birkenau (Březinka). Hundreds of thousands of prisoners from all over Europe passed through these places. On 7 October 1944, Jewish prisoners of the so-called Sonderkommando revolted – although the uprising was stopped with brutal force, they managed to destroy one of the crematories. Over a million people, mostly of Jewish descent, were killed in the gas chambers of the three Auschwitz concentration camps. In 1947, a museum was established on the premises of the camp in honour of its victims.