The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery

by Captain Witold Pilecki

  I bumped into one of the professors during the day and he made a vile impression on me. His eyes were somehow loathsome.

  For a time we could see nothing on this block and all we could do was speculate.

  But they did need help from the pflegers from the camp hospital.

  Initially they were cleaning, then they helped in other ways. They took two pflegers and happened to choose two who were in our organization.

  Our lads eventually got into Block 10, which was permanently closed.

  For a time that was of no help to us, since they were not let out of Block 10. However, one day one of them, 101 [Witold Kosztowny], came to see me; he was terribly worried and said that he would not be able to stand it there for long and that he was reaching the end of his tether.

  They were carrying out experiments there.

  The doctors and medical students were carrying out experiments and, with so much human material available, they felt no sense of responsibility for it to anyone.

  These guinea pigs’ lives were in any event at the mercy of the deviants in the camp, so they would be killed in one way or another and would eventually end up as ashes.

  So all sorts of sexual experiments were being carried out.

  Men and women were being sterilized by a surgical procedure. Sexual organs of both sexes were exposed to some kind of radiation, which was supposed to kill their reproductive abilities. Subsequent tests were meant to show if the radiation had worked or not.

  Sexual intercourse was not involved. There was a kommando of a few men who were to provide sperm which was immediately injected into the women.

  The tests showed that after a few months the women whose organs had been subjected to radiation, again became pregnant. Then a far more powerful dose was employed, which burnt their sexual organs, and several dozen women died in terrible agony.

  Women of all races were used in these experiments. Poles, Germans, Jews and later Gypsies were brought in from Birkenau. Several dozen young girls were brought from Greece and they died in these experiments. All of them, even after a successful experiment, were liquidated. Not a single man or woman emerged alive from Block 10.

  Efforts were made to produce artificial male sperm, but they produced nothing but negative results.

  Injecting the artificially produced substitute sperm brought on some kind of infection.

  The women on whom these experiments were made were then finished off with phenol.

  Seeing all this suffering, 101 [Witold Kosztowny] had for an “old hand” become exceptionally overwrought.

  Another witness to what was going on in Block 10 was 57 [Edward Ciesielski] (both are alive and currently free).

  Sometimes in the evening, there in Auschwitz, in our own crowd, we would say that it would be a miracle if anyone got out alive and that he would have difficulty getting on with people who had been living normal lives all this time.

  For him, some of their concerns would simply be too insignificant.

  He in his turn would not be understood by them...

  But, if someone really did get out, then his duty would be to tell the world how real Poles were dying here.

  Let him also tell how people, all people, were dying here... murdered by other people...

  How odd this sounded in Christian terms:... murdered by their fellow men, as was the case many centuries ago...

  Therefore, I have already written that we had... taken such a wrong turning... but to... where? Where were we going... on this march of “progress”?

  We received information through our channels from the political department that they were planning to send all the Poles (inmates) away for fear of incidents in the camp.

  The authorities recognized that such a great concentration of Poles—whose experiences alone had strengthened their resolve, turning them into individuals ready for anything— on Polish territory with local support outside, was a threat.

  Should there be an airborne assault or an arms drop... Neither we nor our Allies contemplated such a thing— or even conceived of it—so our enemies did.

  For the time being they started to pull some of the Poles out of their kommandos, thus getting the kommandos used to doing without them.

  Poles were always the best workers in every kommando.

  The Germans said that they were as good as Germans, but that was not true.

  They were ashamed to admit that the Poles were better.

  At first, just those Poles whose appearance indicated that they had become “craftsmen” only in the camp were pulled out of the specialist kommandos.

  About 150 of the 500 in the bekleidungswerkstätte [clothing workshop] were taken out.

  Since I looked like an educated sort, I was among them. It was the 2nd of February (of ’43).

  For some reason this did not bother me at all. I felt that this change would not turn out badly for me.

  The following day I was already in a basket-weaving kommando, taken on by my friends.

  Indeed, there was now a custom that an “old number” was accepted into any kommando. He was now an elder in the prison world.

  I worked there for only a day, not to the camp’s benefit, but I did learn how to make shoes out of straw.

  The next day I already had an excellent job in the newly formed “parcel” kommando.

  Now that inmates were allowed to receive food parcels, a growing number of truckloads of parcels was arriving daily. The authorities began to have their hands full. The allowance was one food parcel of up to 5 kg a week. On the assumption that it would be impossible to stem the flow of parcels, large parcels were banned, but no limit was put on the number of small parcels (up to 250 g each) that could be sent each week.

  It then turned out that the authorities had blundered. An avalanche of small packages arrived every day.

  Families, glad that they could help their loved ones in the camp, rushed off to send a small package every day, instead of one large parcel a week.

  The result was the opposite of what the authorities had imagined. The volume of work involved in processing this vast number of deliveries and then distributing them to the inmates required a whole organization, a whole kommando into which I got myself.

  We were allocated three small rooms on Block 3. One of the main rooms there was filled with packages.

  The efficiency demanded of all camp kommandos required here too a major effort to clear the backlog, which was also in the inmates’ interests, if it led to the speedy delivery of their packages.

  The kommando operated in two shifts of 20 inmates each, and the parcel office worked around the clock.

  I intentionally chose the night shift.

  Given that parcels were being sorted around the clock, the main schreibstube [office] had to work at the same time as us day and night. A card was filled out for every package, and several hundred were sent every thirty minutes to the schreibstube, which put on the card in which block the given “number” (inmate) currently was living, or a cross was made to indicate that he was no longer alive. When the cards were returned, the parcels were sorted by block, shelves having been built, and the parcels whose cards were marked with a cross were put into a great pile in a corner of the room. There were a great number of packages addressed to fellows who had died.

  In addition to those sent to inmates from Jewish, French and Czech transports, who for the most part had already been finished off, many Polish families sent packages too, unaware that the inmate had already died, since, as I have already mentioned, death notices were not always sent out, or the political department delayed sending them for months.

  The SS men carried off the better parcels for those who had died, usually from France or Czechoslovakia and containing wine and fruit, by the basketload to their own mess.

  The humbler parcels usually went to our kitchen, the häftlingsküche, where other food items, already picked over by the SS men, were brought in from “Canada.” Everything was thrown into the cooking pots.
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  At this time we were eating sweet soups, which contained pieces of biscuits and cakes and seemingly smelt of perfume. In our room we once found what was left of some toilet soap, which had not quite dissolved.

  The cooks would sometimes find at the bottom of the pots some gold item or even coins, which had been carefully hidden by their now-deceased owners in a piece of bread, a roll or a cake.

  The men in the parcel office ate with a clear conscience the food packages of fellows who had died, usually handing out bread and soup to their hungrier mates on the block.

  However, we had to be careful eating the packages of the dead. Only the übermenschen [“supermen”] were allowed to eat them; inmates were forbidden to do so on pain of death.

  A search was once made of us inmates leaving work and seven häftlings were found to have white bread, butter and sugar, taken from dead men’s packages, in their pockets. All seven were shot the same day.

  An Austrian SS man ran the parcel department; really quite a decent sort for an SS man.

  After a return to the previous system of a weekly 5 kg parcel, all sorts of packages would come, sometimes whole suitcases; the head of the parcel office did not demur and delivered them all to their addressees—he would make a fleeting inspection for lack of time, sometimes just cutting the string, but when a block chief, a German bastard, while distributing parcels in the block, took a handful of sweets from the parcel of a living inmate, the head of the parcel department reported him and the German block chief was shot the same day.

  In this matter, there was justice...

  I found another way to give my mates extra food.

  I worked nights at the parcel office. The duty SS man would sit in front of me next to the warm stove and he would always doze off at about 2:00 a.m.

  Behind me lay the great pile of parcels for dead fellows. There was also a separate small pile of better parcels ready to be eventually carted off to the SS mess.

  Carrying, registering and moving parcels I took the smaller ones from this separate pile—the SS man was snoring away, I opened them, tore off the address, turned the paper inside out, wrapped it again, tied it up and wrote the address of one of my mates in the camp. I had the authority to repack poorly packed parcels. Some of them had their wrapping completely torn and were thus eminently suitable. Some I did not repack owing to the official stamps on them and simply stuck on a new address, written on another piece of paper. Such a parcel would take the normal route through the parcel office and reach the appropriate shelf.

  The SS man had a comfortable job, since he slept at night and, relieved from duties during the day, he would take his bicycle to visit his wife who lived about 20 kilometers away. In other words, everyone was pleased with things as they stood. Over the course of a single night I tried to readdress eight parcels, two for each battalion, sometimes it was fewer and sometimes even more.

  In the morning I would go around to see those fellows to whom I had sent “dead men’s parcels” and warn them not to look surprised if they received an unexpected parcel.

  Given my change of kommando I was moved to Block 6.

  On the block and at work I met a couple of fellows whom I brought into our organization: Second Lieutenant 164 [Edmund Zabawski], Second Lieutenant 165 [Henryk Szklarz], and Platoon Sergeant 166 [name unknown].

  Before the end of ’42, Olek (Second Lieutenant 167 [Aleksander Bugajski]), was brought in on a transport from Kraków. I was told that he was a hero from the Montelupich Prison, that he had managed once to cheat death by escaping and that now he had two death sentences hanging over him, but because he was smart and somehow knew how to deal with the SS, he had been pretending to be a doctor and had apparently even been treating them, so he had managed to hide. But now they had brought him to Auschwitz, where they would certainly finish him off.

  I got to know him and I liked his sense of humor.

  I suggested to him a way out, which I had been preparing for myself.

  The sewers.

  Friends in the baubüro [construction site office] had brought me a map of the sewers clearly showing the best places to enter the system.

  The German authorities usually only wised up when an inmate had used some particular escape route and then it was almost impossible to take the same route again.

  Thus the proverb “For a Pole hindsight is the only accurate science” 57 should be applied to other nations too.

  By giving Olek my escape route, I more or less ruled it out for myself, but I was not planning to leave just yet, while he was in grave danger.

  I could use him to take out a report and I was counting on some fortunate circumstances for myself.

  Meanwhile First Lieutenant 168 [Witold Wierusz] came to see me with a plan for escaping from his work kommando. He was a deputy kapo. The kapo was sick and so he had greater freedom of movement. He took his own kommando out on surveying work several kilometers from the camp.

  I put him in touch with Second Lieutenant 167 [Aleksander Bugajski]; First Lieutenant 168’s [Witold Wierusz’s] plan suited him better, so 167 [Aleksander Bugajski] began to prepare to leave the camp by that route.

  He transferred a little too suddenly from the parcel kommando where he was working to the surveyors’ kommando where 168 [Witold Wierusz] worked.

  In January (of ’43) 58 seven of the lads got out by way of the SS kitchen during the night.

  Seeing that hanging inmates caught escaping was no deterrent, the authorities tried a new approach. It was announced on every block that if an inmate escaped, his family would be put in the camp.

  That hit us where it hurt.

  No one wanted to endanger his family.

  One day, after returning to camp we saw two women. One pleasant older woman and a pretty young one standing by a post with a sign, on which was written that our pal’s ill-considered actions had condemned these two women to the camp.

  This was by way of a reprisal for one of the fellows’ escape.

  Women were a sensitive issue with us.

  At first the camp cursed the swine who had thus endangered his mother and fiancée while saving his own life, but then it turned out that the two women’s numbers were around 30,000 whereas there were in fact over 50,000 women in the camp.

  We concluded that they were two women who had been picked from the Rajsko camp and then told to stand for a few hours by the pole in our camp. An SS man stood nearby, preventing any kind of conversation.

  Nevertheless, there was no certainty that they wouldn’t bring in our families, and so a number of the lads decided not to attempt to escape.

  No. 167 [Aleksander Bugajski] and 168 [Witold Wierusz] were preparing an attempt. Contact with Kraków had been made through the local population.

  Clothes and female guides were to be waiting in several spots.

  No. 167 [Aleksander Bugajski] also invited me to join him.

  Discussing their method of escape with 168 [Witold Wierusz], I discovered that their plan had not been prepared in detail.

  The inmates were to get the two SS men who went out surveying with them, and who despite orders went into the village for a vodka together, drunk and they would then tie them up. If they couldn’t get them drunk, then they might have to do a “wet job.”

  At that, in the name of the organization, I formally protested.

  In the name of the organization I could not agree to their escape plan, which could result in serious reprisals for the rest of the inmates.

  The trick was to escape, but to do so in such a way that there were no major consequences for the rest of the camp.

  They began to drug the SS men with a barbiturate.

  From the krankenbau [hospital] they had managed to get hold of some barbiturate in powdered form to be administered in vodka—but when used on a few kapos, it did not produce decent results, since it failed to dissolve in the vodka and left a residue at the bottom of the glass.

  They decided to administer the barbiturate in sweets.

/>   Meanwhile nearly 20,000 gypsies were brought to Birkenau and left in a separate enclosure, for the time being with their whole families.

  Then the men were taken away and finished off “Auschwitz style.”

  One day, some of the lads at Rajsko carried out an audacious escape, which we called “Diogenes’s barrel.”

  On a dark, windy and rainy night, a dozen or so inmates got through the wire fence one by one by prizing apart the strands with poles and then inserting a normal barrel, minus its bottom, which had been used to carry food and which now served as insulation from the electric current and through which they crawled like cats through a muff.

  SM

  A group of Gypsy women posing for German soldiers in a Warsaw park during 1940. Gypsies (Roma and Sinti) from Germany and throughout German-occupied territories were rounded up by the Germans, and killed or deported to Jewish ghettoes and to concentration camps.

  USHMM/Jerzy Ficowski

  Gypsies interned at Belzec, one of the main Nazi German extermination camps along with Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek and Chełmno.

  The authorities once again had to have gone wild and been beside themselves.

  So many inconvenient witnesses to what was happening in Rajsko-Birkenau on the loose!

  They decided to pull out every stop to catch the escapees. They brought in the Army to join the search and they searched for three days.

  The camp was locked down, since there were no “posts,” i.e., soldiers to escort the columns going to work.

  The authorities took advantage of this lull to delouse the camp, which was accomplished in three days.

  By coincidence, 167 [Aleksander Bugajski] and 168 [Witold Wierusz] were to have carried out their escape, which had been planned and agreed with an outside organization, the day after “Diogenes’s barrel.” Their inability to leave the camp made the escape out of the question. But there was more to come.

  In the kommandos the supervisors and kapos, fearful of the authorities’ rage, carried out searches of inmates. They checked their work, the roll and indeed anything with which someone else might find fault.