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Commemorating 81 Years Since the Tragic Deportation of Slovak Jewish Women and Girls

Commemorating 81 Years Since the Tragic Deportation of Slovak Jewish Women and Girls
photo: Archive/Commemorating 81 Years Since the Tragic Deportation of Slovak Jewish Women and Girls
30 / 03 / 2023

This week, 81 years have passed since the deportation of one thousand Jewish women and girls from Poprad, Slovakia. Approximately 20 of them lived to see the end of the war.

On Wednesday, 25 March 1942, at 8:20 p.m., the first transport from the railway station in Poprad was dispatched from the territory of the then Slovak state to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland. The transportation went through Žilina and Čadca, and on 26 March at around 4 a.m., it left the territory of Slovakia near the village of Skalité and headed for Zwardoň in Poland. Of the first death train, which, at that time, was boarded by a thousand Eastern Slovak women and girls, only 20 survived the end of the war.

That day marked the beginning of the first wave of deportations of Jews from Slovakia, which lasted until 20 October 1942. During that period, the regime of the time-displaced 57,752 Jews. Around 71 000 Jews from the territory of the wartime Slovak State and another 30 000 from the Slovak territories occupied by Hungary perished in the Nazi concentration camps.

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