1943 (26 Oct) Third Reich, Germany, Censored Folded Letter of a Polish Political Prisoner from Auschwitz Concentration Camp to Krakow Generagouvernement, Censorship Postmark, More Details in Description

This is a rare, fully preserved wartime artifact consisting of an official stationery folder from October 1943 used for prisoner correspondence inside the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
The prisoner was Jan Podoliński (Prisoner Number 34775, born October 7, 1895). He was a Polish political prisoner arrested by the Gestapo and deported to the Auschwitz Main Camp (Stammlager I) in May 1942. At the time of writing, he had already survived nearly a year and a half of camp conditions.

The letter is written in German (with grammatical and spelling flaws reflecting his native Polish background),

Jan opens his letter with a mandatory declaration that he is "thank God, healthy," a forced lie required to pass censorship.
He asks his wife to prioritize sending smaller, weekly packages containing basic sustaining foods like bread and cake, thanking her for a previous shipment of pears.
He urgently requests tobacco and cigarette paper.

In the camp economy, tobacco was used like gold to trade with Kapos or fellow prisoners for life-saving medicine, extra soup, or safer work assignments.

The printed panel on the document explicitly lays down the brutal, totalitarian rules governing how prisoners could interact with the outside world. These regulations were heavily enforced by the SS mail censorship office (Postprüfstelle):
Prisoners were strictly limited to receiving or sending only two letters or postcards per month. The letters could only be written on official camp-issued stationery, and no envelopes could be lined or padded. All letters had to be written entirely in German. If a prisoner wrote in Polish or used code words, the letter was immediately confiscated and destroyed, and the prisoner was often brutally punished.

The rules specified that everything not explicitly permitted was strictly forbidden. Letters could not contain any political commentary, complaints about food, details about work details, news of camp deaths, or descriptions of physical treatment.

Before any letter left or entered the camp, it was physically read by an SS censor. The purple "Geprüft / K.L. Auschwitz" stamp on Jan's letter indicates it successfully passed this terrifying scrutiny without being destroyed.

Provenance: Ex Werbizky.