Szlamach Radoszynski was 27 years old when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. The following year, Szlamach and the rest of the Jews of Warsaw were forced into a ghetto. After the ghetto uprising in 1943, Szlamach was deported to Auschwitz and, later, to Dachau. He was liberated during a forced march on May 1, 1945.
Before World War II, Warsaw was a center of Jewish life and culture in Poland. During the war, the Nazis established ghettos where they forced Jews to live under crowded and miserable conditions. At its height, the ghetto in Warsaw—the largest in Europe—held over 400,000 Jews engaged in a constant struggle for survival.
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The city of Warsaw is the capital of Poland. Before World War II, Warsaw was the center of Jewish life and culture in Poland. Warsaw's prewar Jewish population of more than 350,000 constituted about 30 percent of the city's total population. The Warsaw Jewish community was the largest in both Poland and Europe, and was the second largest in the world, behind that of New York City. The Germans occupied Warsaw on September 29, 1939. In October 1940, the Germans ordered the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw. All Jewish residents were ordered into the designated area, which was sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940. The ghetto was enclosed by a wall that was over 10 feet high, topped with barbed wire, and closely guarded to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw.
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Auschwitz was the largest camp established by the Germans. It was a complex of camps, including a concentration, extermination, and forced-labor camp. It was located at the town of Oswiecim near the prewar German-Polish border in Eastern Upper Silesia, an area annexed to Germany in 1939. Auschwitz I was the main camp and the first camp established at Oswiecim. Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was the killing center at Auschwitz. Trains arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau almost daily with transports of Jews from virtually every German-occupied country of Europe. Auschwitz III, also called Buna or Monowitz, was established in Monowice to provide forced laborers for nearby factories, including the I.G. Farben works. At least 1.1 million Jews were killed in Auschwitz. Other victims included between 70,000 and 75,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma, and about 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war.
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