Liquidation and Deportation

The SS and police planned the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto ... in accordance with the Himmler's order in October 1942 to complete the murder of the Jews residing in the Generalgouvernement, incarcerating those few whose labor was still required in forced-labor camps.

On March 13-14, 1943, the SS and police carried out the operation, shooting some 2,000 Jews in the ghetto. The SS transferred another 2,000 Jews -- those capable of work and the surviving members of the Jewish Council and the Jewish police force (Ordnungsdienst) -- to the Plaszow forced-labor camp, and the rest of the Jews, approximately 3,000, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in two transports, arriving on March 13 and March 16.

Those who were loaded onto trains and sent off were not on trains as we know them today. "There were 12 goods wagons for 650 men; in mine we were only 45 but it was a small wagon. Here then before our very eyes, under our very feet, was one of theose notorious transport trains,those which never return..."(Survival in Auschwitz). At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the camp authorities selected 549 persons from the two transports (499 men and 50 women) to be registered as prisoners and murdered the others, approximately 2,450, in the gas chambers.

As this picture shows, those who were captured has no way of knowing where they would go and were often encamped with those who spoke different languages and had different customs, therefore there were also tentions between the victims as well as between the victims and thier captors.