The name of the village stems from
birch trees (Polish:
brzoza). It was first mentioned in 1385. From 1440 to 1483 Brzezinka was owned by Jan Brzeziński. Politically the village belonged then to the
Duchy of Oświęcim, formed in 1315 in the process of
feudal fragmentation of Poland and was ruled by a local branch of
Piast dynasty. In 1327 the duchy became a
fee of the
Kingdom of Bohemia. In 1457
Jan IV of Oświęcim agreed to sell the duchy to the
Polish Crown, and in the accompanying document issued on 21 February the village was mentioned as
Brzesinka. The territory of the Duchy of Oświęcim was eventually directly incorporated into Poland in 1564 and formed the
Silesian County in the
Kraków Voivodeship in the
Lesser Poland Province. Upon the
First Partition of Poland in 1772 it was annexed by
Austria, and made part of its newly formed Kingdom of
Galicia. In the late 19th century, it had a population of 1,025. After
World War I and the fall of
Austria-Hungary it became again part of
Poland, as the nation regained independence. Following the joint German-Soviet
invasion of Poland, which started
World War II in September 1939, the village was
occupied and annexed by
Nazi Germany. After
this annexation the village was chosen by the
Germans as the site of their
Auschwitz-Birkenau (
Auschwitz II)
death camp, the centerpiece of the
Final Solution to the Jewish Question, whose remains exist along with
Auschwitz I as state museums to commemorate the victims of
Nazism and
the Holocaust. In connection with the construction of the camp, in 1941, the occupiers
expelled the entire Polish population of the village, which was initially deported to the nearby
Pszczyna County, and afterwards either enslaved as
forced labour or deported to the
General Government in the more eastern part of German-occupied Poland. Additionally, in 1943, the Germans established a subcamp of the
Auschwitz concentration camp in the village, in which they enslaved hundreds of men (initially mostly
Poles and
Russians, and later mostly
Jews) as slave labour. After the war, the village was restored to Poland. ==References==