Nine shots rang out behind us. Then there was silence. The SS man must have dashed to the telephone. The one who had been asleep was probably for the first minute quite disoriented.
I wanted to stop Jasiek because I had planned to take a route at right angles to the one we were now dashing along. After about 200 to 300 meters I managed to do this. Jasiek slowed down, I caught up with him and Edek too.
“Well?” asked Jasio panting.
“I think that’s it, for the time being,” I replied.
“You said you had a route planned.”
Correct, I did have a route. I was to cross the River Soła and double back along the opposite bank towards the camp and continue south towards Kęty. But Jasiek haring off like that to the north had changed everything. It was too late to double back. It was after two in the morning. We needed to hurry.
“Well, what now?” the others inquired.
“Nothing, let’s get dressed,” I said to Edek, “I’m going another way.” The two of us were naked, wearing swimming trunks with our clothes in a bundle under our arms.
We had been running some distance from the Soła, but parallel to it and going north.
Now, after dressing and leaving our striped pants, which we had mistakenly taken with us, well hidden in the bushes, I led them to the river bank (the left one) and then followed it north in the bushes.
When we asked Edek if he had the powdered tobacco, he said that he did, but that all of it had spilt while we had been running. If the dogs picked up our scent, they would have their fill of tobacco.
I had dried and rubbed this tobacco quite a long time before, while working in the spoon shop (in the tannery), from which we had once been planning for some of the lads to escape.
To be sure, it had now fallen out rather too quickly, but it still might cover some of our scent.
Not changing our chosen northerly heading, we were confronted by a fork in the river. The Soła flowed into the Vistula, but before that on the right was a railroad bridge which, if the information we had gathered was correct, had a sentry on it all the time.
“Tomek, where are you going?” asked Jasio.
“Stow it! There’s no other way and we don’t have much time. We must take the shortest route.”
We approached the bridge. I was in front. I had rubber soles, Jasio was about 10–15 paces behind me and Edek brought up the rear.
Carefully, keeping my eyes on the hut to the left of one of the bridge’s abutments, I climbed up the railroad embankment and onto the bridge.
The other fellows followed.
Treading softly, we began to cross the bridge quite quickly. We covered a third... then half... we were already approaching the opposite bank... and the end of the bridge... for the time being nothing stood in our way...
Finally we reached the end of the bridge and jumped quickly down from the embankment to the left onto grass and a field.
Quite unexpectedly we had managed to cross the bridge without a problem.
The sentries must have been enjoying the holiday in pleasant company.
I then picked an easterly heading, along the Vistula and on the left-hand side of the railroad tracks.
It was easy to navigate, as the sky was full of twinkling stars.
We already felt to some extent free. But a certain sense of danger still lay between us and a full feeling of freedom.
We began to run cross-country.
The little town of Oświęcim [Auschwitz] lay to our right.
We jumped over ditches, crossed roads and ran across ploughed fields, getting closer to or drawing away from the Vistula as it meandered.
Only later did we marvel at how much effort a man can expend when he is running on nervous energy.
We got onto ploughed fields that ran uphill. We slid down cement banks, or scrambled up like cats on other ones—part of some canal system. As we followed the tracks, a train roared by.
Finally, after several kilometers, at the time it seemed like ten to us (it was a little less), from a rise we saw ahead of us fences, barracks, watchtowers, wire... Before us was a camp with the familiar searchlights creeping over the ground...
For a moment we almost froze. Then we came to the conclusion that it was so-called “Buna,” a subcamp of ours.
We had no time to change our heading.
Dawn was beginning to light up the sky...
We began rapidly to skirt the camp to the left. We came across some wire. We again began to slide down and clamber up banks... We crossed canals on footbridges. At one spot we carefully crossed a footbridge over which foaming water was pouring... We skirted the wire, wading through the water. Finally, we also left this camp behind us.
We ran up against (for we were still able to run) the bank of the Vistula and we began to follow it, looking for somewhere to hide during the day, just in case.
Day was dawning. There was no real cover for us. The dark line of woods could be seen far away on the horizon. It was now quite light.
There was a village here on the bank of the Vistula. Boats belonging to its inhabitants rocked on the water.
I decided to take a boat over the Vistula. The boats were secured with chains to stakes. The chains were locked with padlocks. We examined these chains. One of them consisted of two halves, linked with a screw.
Jasiek took out the wrench (a piece of metal with a hole for the nut) with which he had undone the nut in the bakery.
We were astonished at the coincidence. The wrench was an exact fit for the nut. We undid it. The chain’s two halves fell apart.
The sun was coming up.
We got into the boat and pushed off.
At any moment someone could come out of one of the houses in the village, barely a few dozen meters away.
A dozen or so meters before the opposite bank, the boat hit some shallows. We had no time to shove it off. We jumped into the water and pushed on, wading to the bank in water up to our waists.
Our bodies and joints, warmed by a night of running, reacted accordingly to the cold water. For the time being we felt nothing, leaping onto the bank of the Vistula.
About two kilometers away was a dark line of woods.
The woods, so dear to me and which I had missed for many years, were now our salvation and the first real cover we had encountered.
It would not be true to say that we ran over to this salvation. We had no strength left for running. We walked at a brisk pace, and sometimes slowed down for lack of strength.
The sun was now shining brightly.
We could hear the roar of motorcycles on the roads in the distance, perhaps even in pursuit of us...
We walked slowly...
Edek’s and my clothes looked a little suspicious at close quarters, but at a distance made an unobtrusively dark impression. Jasio’s fine civilian suit, however, was clearly visible at a distance with its bright red stripes.
Some people could be seen working in the fields in the distance. They must have spotted us.
The woods slowly grew closer.
Odd—for the first time in my life I could smell the woods from over a hundred yards away.
A powerful smell assailed all our senses, together with the merry chirping of the birds, a breath of damp, the smell of resin... our eyes bored into the depths of the mysterious wood, now almost upon us.
We went in to a depth of over a dozen trees and lay down on the soft moss.
Lying on my back, my thoughts rose above the treetops and happily formed a great question mark. A metamorphosis. What a contrast with the camp in which I felt that I had spent a thousand years...
The pines whispered, gently waving their huge tops...
Scraps of blue sky could be seen between the tree trunks. The dew shone like little jewels on the bushes and grass...In places the sun’s rays broke through, lighting up the lives of thousands of small creatures...the world of little beetles, bugs and butterflies...the world of birds, unchanging for a thousand years, followed its usual
routine and, flocking and scattering, hummed with its own life...
And yet, despite so many sounds of woodland life, all around us was silence...a deep silence...a silence far from the roar of humanity...far from man’s scheming...a silence in which there was not a living soul...
We did not count.
We were just returning to the land of the living and we were yet to be counted as members of the human race.
How glad we were not to have seen any people so far.
We had decided to keep as far away from them as possible for as long as we could.
However, it was difficult to survive very long without people... We had no food at all. For the time being we were not that hungry. We ate some lettuce and drank from a stream...
We were enchanted by everything.
We were in love with the world...just not with its people...I had a small container of honey which had been sent from home and a teaspoon. I treated Jasio and Edek to a spoonful each, myself too.
As we lay, we talked over the night’s events.
Jasio was balding, so he didn’t need a cap. Edek and I had shaved heads. In order to conceal our lack of hair from other people we had taken two civilian caps from the bakers’ belongings in the bakery, but Edek had lost his while running through the bushes during the night. He now tied a woman’s kerchief on his head. So we called him Ewunia.
Jasio, just to be different, called himself Adam and, looking at a green branch, chose Gałązka [Twig] for a surname. It really matched his 90 kg physique!
After Jasio washed out the red stripes on his suit in a stream and I had dried out four banknotes which had got wet in my shoe, we marched on eastwards through the woods, dashing across small areas of open ground, and skirting the larger ones along the woods’ edge.
Our rule was to give people as wide a berth as possible...
Just before evening, we had a minor run-in with a gamekeeper, who had spotted us in the distance as we were eating up the last of the honey... and, wanting to stop us, had blocked our path, so I scrambled into some young-growth trees, which were conveniently near... They were so dense, that we could only crawl through. Amongst these trees I changed heading and emerged by a road.
We dashed across and again got into some young-growth trees.
The gamekeeper lost our trail, we kept to the road because, according to the road signs, it led to the small town of Z [Babice],67 which lay on our route.
We approached the town after sundown.
A ruined castle stood on a hill before the town.
We skirted to the left of the open ground in front of the town. We slipped over a road between the houses and headed for the wooded hill, straight towards the castle ruins.
Near the ruins, on the side of the hill, terribly tired, we lay down to sleep buried in the previous year’s leaves. Thus passed Tuesday (the 27th of April).
Edek fell asleep immediately.
After our cold bath, Jasiek and I had inflammation of the joints and I also had an inflammation of the sciatic nerve.
The last hour I had pushed on by willpower alone. In addition to the pain in my right hip, the pain in my knee joints, especially when going down slopes, was so severe that I could only walk “gritting my teeth.”
Now, when I was lying down, the pain was less intense, but it still bothered me.
Jasiek felt no pain lying down and also fell asleep.
I was unable to fall asleep. Taking advantage of this, I began to consider what to do next.
Eight kilometers away lay the border between Silesia, annexed by the Third Reich, and the Generalgouvernement,68 which we had to cross.
For long hours, half dozing, I worked on a plan how to get to and then across this frontier and where we would go after that. When suddenly, a kind of epiphany hit me and I sat up in the leaves... sucking in my breath from the pain...
I remembered the year of ’42. I was working in the spoon shop (the tannery) where 19 [Tadeusz Słowiaczek] was working as schreiber [clerk] and with whom I had often had very frank conversations.
He told me to whom he wrote letters, that his uncle was a priest right by the border, that his parish straddled the border and that, as parish priest, he was allowed to cross it with a cart driver, whom he could, if he had to, leave on the other side...
It was only about 7 or 8 kilometers to the little town where my friend’s relative was the parish priest.
In his sleep Edek began to say something, at first not very clearly, but then he began asking some Bronek or other whether he had brought him some bread (he was hungry and so he was dreaming of food). He suddenly leapt to his feet and asked so loudly that Jasiek woke up:
“Well? Has he brought the bread?”
“Who’s supposed to have brought the bread?”
“Bronek, of course!”
“Don’t worry, my friend. Can’t you see the wood, the castle and us sleeping in the leaves? You’ve been dreaming...”
Edek lay down.
But now I stood up. It was four o’clock. I had decided to reach the priest in the morning. We did not have too many kilometers, but painful joints. The pain in my knees meant that I could barely move my legs. Jasiek got up stretching, but staggered and began to slip down the hillside. He almost fainted from the pain in his knee joints. However, he controlled himself.
The initial steps were hard and painful, especially when going downhill.
It took us quite some time to cover these seven or eight kilometers, meandering a bit. At first it went slowly, then a little faster.
Jasiek, in order to obtain some information, and as the best dressed amongst us and not needing to hide his lack of hair, went up to a local on his way to work and walked along chatting with him.
We were approaching the town of II [Alwernia].
A small church could be seen on a wooded hill.
Jasiek left the local and joined us, bringing the information that the place we were seeking matched the one we could see, which was near the hill with the church.
Picking our way between fields we reached a road on which stood a customs post. The border itself was further along, on a hill.
It was seven o’clock. There were a couple of people already in the post who were studying us carefully at a distance.
However, we crossed the road, then went over a stream by a bridge and carried on in full view of these people, trying to walk briskly and jauntily.
We finally reached the wooded hill and once we had covered several dozen meters up the slope, we fell to the ground exhausted.
And, as if on cue, the bell in the church tower, which was at the top of the hill, rang out...
“It can’t be helped, my dear Jasiek, you’ve got to go to the church. You’re the most presentable of us and you’re the only one of us who can go in, for you can be bareheaded.”
So I sent Jasiek off to see the priest, whom he was to tell that we had been together, there in hell, with his brother Franciszek and his brother’s two sons, Tadek and Lolek.
Jasio went off and was gone a long time.
He eventually returned looking doubtful, and said that he had waited in the church for the priest who came to say mass and that he had spoken to him. But the priest had been unwilling to believe that we had managed to escape from Auschwitz and had stated openly that he was afraid that this could be some kind of trap.
I thought to myself, when he saw Jasiek smiling from ear to ear it must have been hard for him, on hearing the name Auschwitz, to believe immediately that Jasiek had been imprisoned there for over two and a half years. And that he had managed to escape.
I sent Jasio back, for the mass might end, and I coached him carefully on which of his relations had been on which block, where his nephews had gone, on what block their father now was. I even told him what they had put in their last Christmas letters.
Jasio went off. The mass ended. Jasio went up to the priest. He told him everything, adding that two of his mates were in the bushes and that they could not
come out on account of their lack of hair and odd combination of clothes.
The priest believed him and accompanied Jasio back to us.
On seeing us, he wrung his hands. He finally believed the whole story. He started coming to see us in the bushes every half hour, bringing milk, coffee, rolls, bread, sugar, butter and other delicacies.
It turned out that this was not the priest we had been thinking of, who was about two kilometers away.
He knew the other priest and the story of his family in Auschwitz.
He could not bring us into his house, for there were too many people about in the square.
We were actually very comfortable there among the young spruces and bushes.
The priest gave us some ointment to rub into our joints. We now wrote our first letters home, which the priest then posted for us.
In the evening, when it was quite dark, the priest gave us a good guide.
There are still good people on this earth, we said to one another.
Thus ended Wednesday (the 28th of April).
We said goodbye to the priest. Our knee joints now hurt less. At ten o’clock in the evening we followed our guide with a view to crossing the border.
The guide led us for a long time, taking a roundabout way, then pointed to a spot and said that that was the best place. He then went back.
Perhaps it was the safest spot for the very reason that it was filled with felled trees, wire and crisscrossed with ditches, and so the border patrol must have felt that no one would want to take this route and was watching elsewhere.
It took us a good hour to cross a 150-meter belt.
We now proceeded quickly over varying terrain, but for the most part keeping to the road.
The night was dark. There was no danger of being spotted at a distance. However, we could bump into a patrol, but some kind of animal alertness, or was it instinct, continued to guide us safely.
Sometimes, when the road went in the wrong direction, we left it and walked cross-country, using the stars to navigate, pushing through woods, tumbling into holes, scrambling up slopes.
We walked the whole night covering, so it seemed to us, a great deal of ground.
The first gleam of dawn found us in a rather large village, which dragged on for kilometers. In the village the road veered left. Our route lay at an angle to the right. Since we had spotted in the distance on the road to the left the first group of people of the day, we turned right at an angle and continued across pastures and a meadow.
The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery Page 26