For people brought to Auschwitz from the displaced area of Zamojszczyzna, detention in the concentration camp was a shock, especially since they were generally accompanied by the belief that they would be taken to forced labor in the Reich. Although most of them were not charged or prosecuted, they were marked with red triangles, signifying political prisoners and from the first moments, they were treated with the same ruthlessness as other prisoners. The moment of disembarking from the wagons to the Birkenau ramp was accompanied by aggression from the SS: they were screaming and kicking the newcomers, beating them with the flasks of their rifles, and setting the dogs on them. Families were not allowed to reunite, women were brutally separated from men and set up in separate groups. Many men saw their mothers, wives and daughters for the last time. Many women were also doomed to never see their fathers, brothers or sons again.

As these transports arrived in Auschwitz during the night, confused people were escorted to the camp — women to the women’s camp, and men to the camp for men — and placed in a bath or in a transition barrack, where under difficult, primitive conditions they waited for registration. The men from the first transport were locked in barrack No. 22, which was wooden and did not even have a bunk. Instead of a proper floor, there was a wet dirt floor.

Most likely, on the morning of the next day, registration started. Both men and women were forced to undress in the presence of other people and to give away all their private property. The naked inmates were directed to shower and were subject to the humiliating procedure of shaving and disinfection of all hairy places on the body. These activities were accompanied by laughter, ordinary jokes and cheap comments, as well as mockery and beating by SS men and some function prisoners working in the baths. Additionally, women had to spend some time in the so-called saunas, i.e., a room filled with hot steam, where the temperature was so high that some fainted from the heat. 

After bathing and disinfection, the prisoners' clothing was allocated. The camp garments they received were usually very worn and dirty. Women and men had to sew strips of white canvas with the camp numbers printed on, and red triangles with the letter “P”, meaning Polish political prisoners. These numbers were supposed to replace their names and became their only identifiers in the camp reality. A little later, the same numbers were tattooed on their forearms.

The Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) oversaw the Polish community displaced from Zamojszczyzna. This fact was reflected in the personal cards (Häftlings- Personal-Karte) written in the camp for each newly arrived prisoner, where the entry ‘RSHA’ can be found in the heading of the column indicating the administrative unit that sent the prisoner to the camp (and sometimes under the heading ‘reason for arrest’).

By the spring of 1943, the newly arrived prisoners were generally photographed in three positions, and these photos were attached to their prisoner file. However, since the acquisition of photographic materials in the conditions of the war was difficult after the spring of 1943, this practice was gradually abandoned by introducing the tattoo number as a more effective method of identification.

The men brought to Auschwitz from the transition camp in Zamość were probably not photographed at all, while camp photographs of some women were preserved. In order for their pictures to be taken, the women were led from Birkenau to the camp photographic studio in block 26 in the main camp. There, the photograph was taken in three positions — the right profile with the camp number, en face and in the headgear. These pictures were not taken on the day of arrival, but with some delay. For example, women from the first transport were photographed only after the quarantine period, so it can be assumed that bruises and mutilations visible on some faces may be evidence of violence against prisoners in the camp. Captured in photographs, women are dressed in camp garments, some clearly dirty and ragged. Most of them have shaved heads and are wearing handkerchiefs, and their faces express fear, resignation and despair: