How many people survived being imprisoned at Auschwitz?
Recent (1996) press articles estimate the number of people to have survived imprisonment at Auschwitz to be 200,000. The real number is unknown, but many people were imprisoned at Auschwitz and its satellite camps for very short times and were then released after they had served their sentences. The real number, depending on the definition of ‘survived’, therefore may be higher. This huge number of survivors is interesting in that the extermination program was supposed to have been a state secret. Witnesses to it were supposedly killed as part of the effort to destroy the evidence of the crime. Yet the crematories were built in plain sight of everyone arriving at camp and most of the barracks buildings. An athletic field was situated next to Crematory III. There was no effort to hide the facilities, and the people imprisoned at Auschwitz could see everything.
Recent (1996) press articles estimate the number of people to have survived imprisonment at Auschwitz to be 200,000. The real number is unknown, but many people were imprisoned at Auschwitz and its satellite camps for very short times and were then released after they had served their sentences. The real number, depending on the definition of ‘survived’, therefore may be higher. This huge number of survivors is interesting in that the extermination program was supposed to have been a state secret. Witnesses to it were supposedly killed as part of the effort to destroy the evidence of the crime. Yet the crematories were built in plain sight of everyone arriving at camp and most of the barracks buildings. An athletic field was situated next to Crematory III. There was no effort to hide the facilities, and the people imprisoned at Auschwitz could see everything.
Recent (1996) press articles estimate the number of people to have survived imprisonment at Auschwitz to be 200,000. The real number is unknown, but many people were imprisoned at Auschwitz and its satellite camps for very short times and were then released after they had served their sentences. The real number, depending on the definition of ‘survived’, therefore may be higher. This huge number of survivors is interesting in that the extermination program was supposed to have been a state secret. Witnesses to it were supposedly killed as part of the effort to destroy the evidence of the crime. Yet the crematories were built in plain sight of everyone arriving at camp and most of the barracks buildings. An athletic field was situated next to Crematory III. There was no effort to hide the facilities, or to kill the people imprisoned at Auschwitz who could see everything.
“Fighting Auschwitz” is the name of a book by a survivor of the *Polish*, non-Jewish section of the Camp. Auschwitz was split in two. The Polish section was a labor camp for enslaved Polish labor. Many of the witnesses to what was going on in Auschwitz came from two groups: • The Polish Home Army veterans imprisoned on the Polish side and • Surviving Jews or “Kopeks”, ‘trustees’ by the Germans used to organize and administor the Camps for the Nazi. Many of them testified in the Spielberg supported witness program that has over 200,000 eyewitness accounts by survivors. Additionally there is actual hard statitical evidence presented at Nuremberg by the Nazi particpants themselves and garnerned from paper work readily available to the procescutors.
