Kazimierz Albin, early Auschwitz prisoner, dies in Poland

WARSAW, Poland — Kazimierz Albin, the last survivor of the first convoy of prisoners sent by the Nazis to the Auschwitz death camp, dies at the age of 96, the camp museum says.

“With great sorrow we received information about the death of Kazimierz Albin, the last living survivor of the first transport of Poles to the German Auschwitz camp (No. 118),” the Auschwitz Memorial says on its official Twitter site.

Born in 1922 in the southern Polish city of Krakow, Albin was arrested by the Nazis in January 1940 in Slovakia where he had fled after Germany occupied Poland in 1939. Albin had been on his way to join the Polish Army then forming in France to fight the Nazis.

On June 14, 1940, he was deported to Auschwitz with the first convoy of Polish prisoners.

Their forearms were tattooed with the camp’s notorious identification numbers ranging from 31 to 758. Albin was tattooed with the number 118.

He was one of the 140,000 to 150,000 non-Jewish Polish prisoners in Auschwitz, half of whom died there, according to Auschwitz museum estimates. Albin survived because he managed to escape on February 27, 1943 along with six other prisoners.

Nazi Germany killed some 1.1 million people, including one million European Jews, at the Auschwitz-Birkenau twin death camps before their liberation by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945.

— AFP