Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses antisemitism, the Holocaust, murder, and physical and sexual violence.

World War II broke out when Germany (as well as Russia) invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939. Overwhelmed by the German invasion, Poland was defeated in October of 1939 and then partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union.

Germany’s invasion of Hungary (where the Lengyel family lived) in March of 1944 allowed them to institute their program of state-sanctioned antisemitism, which enabled them to find the identity of Jewish individuals and forcibly transport them to extermination camps, as happened to Miklos Lengyel and his family (Hughs, Thomas A. & Rhoyde-Smith, John Graham. “WWII.” Britannica, 1998).

Part of Hitler’s plan for German expansion and domination was the extermination of European Jewry; Hitler conceived of Judaism as a race and believed that Jews were a lesser, subhuman species called Untermenschen, who were determined to achieve world domination at the detriment of all other races. Most notably, these Untermenschen were allegedly taking wealth and power from the Aryan race, an obsolete racial concept used by Nazis to refer to a “pure race” of Germans that excluded Jews, Roma, and people of African descent.  

Initially, murders of Jews took the form of close-range shootings into mass graves. A specialized sub-group of the Nazi army called the Einsatzgruppen carried out these murders. Tens of thousands of Jews in Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania lost their lives in this way. However, this was not considered an expedient solution, and the physical and psychological strain on German troops from this method of killing was considered problematic. Furthermore, by October 1939, the Nazis had control of over 2 million Jews between Germany, Poland, Austria, and the Czech Republic (known at the time as the territories of Sudetenland, Moravia, and Bohemia), and this number continued to grow with German expansion.

As the Nazis decided what was to be done about the Jewish “problem,” they forcibly detained Jews across Europe into overcrowded ghettos. In 1941, the Nazi party developed the “final solution” to the Jewish “problem”: an intentional, mass extermination of European Jews and other “undesirables.” The Nazis established death camps in German-controlled Poland: Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and—most notorious of all—Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Nazis initially used mobile gas vans at these centers, and they later built permanent gas chambers attached to crematoriums. To minimize the psychological cost to German personnel, the Nazis used labor in the form of Jewish prisoners or prisoners of war who made up the Sonderkommandos, the workers in the gas chambers and crematoria.

Over 6 million European Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, which only ceased when camps were liberated by Allied soldiers.