Shoah

On the morning of 16 December 1942, the last deportation train left the small town of Płońsk, north-west of Warsaw. A postcard was left on the platform to inform relatives in the Warsaw Ghetto: “Płońsk 16.XII.42. It is morning. I am inside a railcar with the whole family. We are leaving with the last departure. Płońsk has been cleared. Please go to the Bams [or Bamas] at 6 Niska Street and give them our regards.” The destination of the transport was the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Of the 1.1 million Jews murdered there, 12,000 came from the Płońsk Ghetto.

At the latest since the summer of 1941, the German government and its agencies in occupied Europe had been planning systematic genocide. In the course of the invasion of the Soviet Union, mobile killing units carried out mass shootings. From autumn 1941, gas chambers were installed in camps in Eastern Europe – including Auschwitz-Birkenau. Killing centres were set up in Bełżec, Treblinka and Sobibór for “Aktion Reinhardt”. From 1942, deportations took place throughout Europe to the extermination camps in occupied Poland, where people were murdered within a few hours. The looming defeat of Germany from 1943 onwards led to further radicalisation, claiming the lives of around 6 million Jews by 1945.