History /
The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]
Who committed ethnic cleansing on Polish soil during or after the war ?
Here is a little example of German genocide committed on Polish children of Zamosc region . There were 150 000 of Polish chidren kidnapped during the war , some 30 000 of them from Zamość region . Many of them later were murdered in death camps.
Displaced by expulsions from the Zamosc region were sent to concentration camps under the Central Emigration Office in Lodz, located in Zamosc, ul. S. Okrzei - resettlement camp in Zamosc, Zwierzyniec, Budzyn, Frampol, Lublin, Tarnogrod, Bilgoraj and Solska. There the selection of racial deportees was done , were people were divided into groups and separated parents from children.
A group of orphaned children resulted by such actions is known today as the Children of Zamosc.
"At that time I've seen visually, as Germans disconnect children from their mothers. This separation of mothers from their children most shocked me. Worst torture , were nothing compared with this view. Germans took children, if any resistance occurred , even a very faint , they beat them with sticks to the blood - mothers and children. Then in the camp I heard the screech and cry . Sometimes the mother asked the Germans for food for the hungry and shivering children. All she could get, was the blow of a rod or a whip. I saw the Germans who were killing small children (...) The hygiene conditions are terrible. lice, dirt, fleas, bed bugs devoured alive people. " - Leonard Szpuga, expelled farmer
Repatriates in transit camps were divided into 4 groups:
people who qualified for the German race,
persons able to go to forced labor,
elderly, the disabled and children,
persons for extermination in concentration camps.
In the camps, particularly children suffered - hunger, cold, disease and were more likely to die than adults . Children separated from their parents were separately transported in cattle cars (one car transported from 100 to 150 children) to the death camps at Majdanek and Auschwitz, and to factories in the Reich. Some of the children were transported to a concentration camp for children in Lodz [6].
The news of the drama of Children of Zamojszczyzna quickly spread across the country. Polish railroad workers conveyed the news of the transports of children to the camps to inhabitants of the cities where the transports had their parking stations. The inhabitants of Sobolev, Żelechów, Siedlce, Garwolin, Pilawa and Warsaw took a risk by trying to save children from the hands of Germans.
Only 800 of them returned to their homes .
From 150 000 of all Polish kidnapped children only a small fraction returned to Poland .
