Incredible story of the 196 courageous prisoners who got away from the notorious death camp. But how on earth DID they do it?
By Guy Walters
Daily Mail
January 12, 2018
With its powerful 2.3-litre engine, the Steyr 220 was by far the fastest car in Auschwitz. As a result, it was often used by the camp’s feared commandant, SS-Lieu tenant Colonel Rudolf Hoess, to whisk him to Berlin for meetings.
However, one Saturday afternoon in the middle of June 1942, the sedan had been commandeered from the motor pool by a relatively lowly SS-Second Lieutenant, who was accompanied by three SS NCOs. As the car approached the main gate of the death camp, the four men grew increasingly anxious. One of them was so nervous that his face was ashen-white, and his brow covered in sweat.
Had the men really been members of the SS, of course, they would not have worried about the ever-nearing checkpoint, which was manned by their fellow members of the notoriously murderous unit. But the men’s uniforms belied their true identities. They were in fact Polish prisoners, who had not only appropriated the uniforms from a storeroom, but also stolen the car. Each man knew all too well what fate they would all suffer if their attempt to escape from Auschwitz was rumbled.
The Steyr stopped in front of the barrier and, for a moment, the men dared not move.
The man dressed in the officer’s uniform was Kazimierz Piechowski, 22, who had been incarcerated in the camp exactly two years before because of his membership of the Polish boy scouts. After what seemed an age, he felt one of his fellow escapees tapping his shoulder, and urging him to ‘do something’.
‘This was the most dramatic moment,’ Piechowski recalled in an interview many decades later. ‘I started shouting.’
‘Wake up you buggers!’ the phoney SS-officer shouted at the guards. ‘Open up, or I’ll open you up!’
If Piechowski had any worries about his acting ability, they were soon dispelled by the sight of a trembling guard raising the barrier and snapping his heels together to attention. The driver edged the car forward, and slowly accelerated away.
Suspecting the alarm would soon be raised, the prisoners stuck to obscure forest roads as they headed 20 miles south-east towards the town of Wadowice, where they abandoned the car.
Almost miraculously, none of the escapers would be recaptured, and all four would survive the war. Piechowski would live to a grand age of 98, and he died shortly before Christmas, after a career as an engineer and a long retirement spent visiting some 60 countries around the world.
It would be tempting to suppose that Piechowski’s story is somehow exceptional, perhaps even unbelievable. However, he was just one of an astonishing 196 prisoners who did manage to flee successfully from the camp, of whom a majority also survived the war. In total, 928 men, women and children attempted to escape, which means that just over a fifth of all efforts were successful.
When one compares that ratio to one at a prisoner-of-war camp such as Colditz, from where only some 30 men managed to escape out of many hundreds of attempts, it becomes apparent that those who fled from Auschwitz were both extremely resourceful — and fortunate.
Yet the stories of these inmates who — unlike Allied prisoners-of-war — were literally fleeing for their lives, are not well known.
How many today have heard, for example, of Tadeusz Wiejowski, the first person to escape from Auschwitz?
A cobbler, Wiejowski was among the earliest inmates of the camp, and had arrived on the first transport of prisoners on June 14, 1940. Whatever ‘crime’ he had committed is now unclear, but what is certain is that he was desperate to escape.
Shortly after his arrival, the 26-year-old befriended a group of Polish civilians who worked as electricians for a nearby German firm. Fortunately for him, they were members of a secret resistance organisation called the Union of Unarmed Combat, and were keen to help Wiejowski get away.
Just a few weeks later, on July 6, dressed as an electrician, Wiejowski simply walked out of the camp along with the Poles, who provided him with food and money.
At a nearby goods yard, Wiejowski surreptitiously boarded a freight train and made good his escape. The retribution by the camp’s SS authorities was predictably brutal. When Wiejowski’s absence was discovered during the evening roll call, precisely 1,311 inmates were made to stay standing for 20 hours. A Polish Jew called Dawid Wongczewski, who had been suffering from tuberculosis, died, and became the first person to lose their life in Auschwitz.
The five Polish electricians who assisted Wiejowski were soon arrested, savagely beaten, and imprisoned in the camp. Only one would survive.
Sadly, Wiejowski himself was not to outlive the war. After a year in hiding with his family in his hometown, he was arrested in the autumn of 1941 and, later that year, he was shot.
But Wiejowski would not be the only prisoner from that first transport to escape from Auschwitz.
Another was a young painter called Jan Komski, who had graduated from the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts shortly before the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.
Imprisoned in the camp after being arrested for carrying false identity papers as he attempted to join the incipient Free Polish Army in France, Komski mounted his escape on December 29, 1942, after enduring two-and-a-half years in Auschwitz.
As with Piechowski’s escape earlier that year, Komski’s attempt required a huge amount of bluffing. That morning, he and three comrades started to walk towards the camp’s main gate accompanied by a horse-drawn cart. Three of the men, including Komski, were dressed as inmates, but the fourth man — Boleslaw Kuczbara — was disguised as an SS NCO, and even had a forged pass.
Both the uniform and the document passed muster as the four men walked out of the camp. They made it to a nearby village where a female member of the resistance supplied them with civilian clothes.
For the next 16 days, Komski remained free, until he was arrested in a spot-check on a train bound for Warsaw. However, Komski’s forged identity papers now bore a different name, which meant he was not identified as an Auschwitz escapee. And although he would spend the rest of the war in the concentration camp system —including at, of all places, Auschwitz — the Nazis would never know his real name. Had they done so, he would have been executed.
After the war, Komski emigrated to the U.S., where he worked for the Washington Post as an illustrator. He died in 2002 aged 87.
Like Komski, August Kowalczyk was another young Pole of artistic bent, who had been arrested and sent to Auschwitz for trying to join the Free Polish Army. A keen actor, Kowalczyk had been sent to the camp in December 1940, and he worked on various construction sites until he was transferred to a penal unit in May 1942 as a punishment for fraternising with locals.
Knowing that life expectancy in the unit was even more parlous than that of an ordinary prisoner, Kowalczyk mounted a brazen escape on June 10, 1942, when he and some 50 other inmates simply bolted from the field where they were digging a drainage ditch.
Rifle and machine-gun fire killed more than 40 of the fleeing men, but Kowalczyk was one of the lucky nine. For a while, he lay low among some crops until a local woman stumbled across him, gave him some female clothes as a disguise, and helped him hide in an attic.
After hiding for seven weeks, he joined a unit of the underground Polish Home Army, for which he fought until the end of the war.
After 1945, Kowalczyk became an actor and director of renown, and in later years, he founded a hospice in the town of Auschwitz — now called Oswiecim — to thank the local population for all they had done to help the prisoners. His wish was to die in the hospice, which was granted in July 2012, when he passed away at 90.
But it was not just men who escaped from Auschwitz. On July 21, 1944, the guards manning the main gate allowed an SS man and a female inmate to pass through.
What they did not know was that the man was in fact a Pole called Jerzy Bielecki, who had been arrested in 1940 for attempting to join the Polish Army.
During his incarceration, Bielecki had been forced to work in a grain warehouse, where he met a young woman called Cyla Cybulska. Although male and female inmates were forbidden to talk, Bielecki and Cybulska managed to snatch a few words, and after a while, they fell in love. Cyla was adamant she would not survive Auschwitz. Her entire family had been murdered by Nazis, but Bielecki insisted she would live. He was good to his word, and after managing to cobble together an SS uniform, the couple made their audacious escape. After they left the camp, Bielecki and Cybulska walked through the countryside for ten days, until they eventually found refuge with Bielecki’s uncle.
Towards the end of the war, the couple decided to part ways in order to lessen their chances of being recaptured, and they promised they would get back together when the fighting ceased.
Unfortunately, in the chaotic aftermath of the war, the couple could not find each other, and Cyla was informed Bielecki had been killed. It would not be until May 1983, when she was living in New York, that Cyla was told by her cleaning lady she had just watched a documentary featuring their incredible story, and that Bielecki was alive and living in Poland.
The couple met the following month. She implored him to leave his wife and children, but he refused. After several meetings, Cyla returned to New York, and vowed never to see him again. She died in 2005, and he passed away six years later.
While these stories of derring-do prove that the Auschwitz guards could be outwitted by a combination of cunning, chutzpah and courage, some escapes would prove to be of historical importance.
Among these were those of Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, two Czechoslovak Jews who escaped in April 1944 after hiding in a hollowed-out wood pile on a construction site in the camp.
A fortnight after they escaped, Vrba and Wetzler made contact with the Slovakian underground Working Group, and they were urged to write down their experiences in Auschwitz.
The two men produced a highly detailed account that would soon become known as the Vrba-Wetzler Report. It contained sketches of the gas chambers, as well as a full description of transports to the camp and how inmates were killed. Realising its importance, the Working Group managed to smuggle the report not only to the Red Cross and the Vatican, but also to the Allied governments.
The document was widely reported in the press and the evidence led to the Allies bombing several buildings in Hungary, in an attempt to kill the Nazi officials who were masterminding the ‘evacuation’ of Jews to Auschwitz.
The deportations soon ceased, and some historians estimate that some 120,000 lives were saved.
‘No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler had determined for them,’ observed the late historian, Sir Martin Gilbert.
For that we should be truly thankful. But we should not forget the stories of those whose escapes have faded into obscurity. For every one reminds us that even in the darkest of places, the human spirit continues to burn brightly.
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