On 11 November 1941, under the failure Wall in Auschwitz, on the anniversary of Poland's regaining independency in 1918, the first execution was carried out by a shot in the back of the head with a small-caliber weapon. Convicts stripped naked, with their hands tied in the back, were shot individually. A camp number was written on each of their breasts before they were executed.
She was being watched by the camp commander. Rudolf Höss and camp manager and camp doctor. He shot a C.O. Gerhard Palitzsch, each time loading a fresh cartridge into the rifle. On that day he shot 76 prisoners, almost the Poles themselves.
At the time, 27 prisoners were executed, in prison from 10 October to 2 November 1941. Additionally, the camp Gestapo called 49 prisoners from various blocks in Auschwitz, who were besides shot. The bodies of the murdered were burned in Crematorium No. 1, which has inactive been preserved today.
The Auschwitz Museum archive stores a list of these 44 prisoners, secretly compiled by the Camp opposition Movement. It contains the dates and place of birth of the murdered and the addresses of their families. This list includes Tadeusz Lech, born 4 March 1913 in Szarów close Bochnia, a student of past and Polish studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.
In his post-war study of 1945, the rot master Witold Pilecki, a voluntary prisoner of Auschwitz and the creator of the military conspiracy in this camp, wrote that among the victims of this execution, deliberately carried out by German Nazis on the anniversary of Poland's regaining independence, was Lieutenant of the Reserve Tadeusz Lech, camp No. 9235, who said to him hours before his death: "I am glad that I will die on 11 November."
Witold Pilecki himself, camp no. 4859, although he survived Nazi totalitarianism, he died during Stalinist terror, shot in the Warsaw prison in Mokotów on 25 May 1948.
Adam Cyra
