⛓️ Brought In
Kazimierz Piechowski was a Polish Boy Scout. The Nazis seized the Scouts as seeds of resistance. Trying to flee to France, he was caught crossing the Hungarian border. After several prisons, on June 20, 1940, he was brought to Auschwitz. His prisoner number was 918.
🤝 The Execution List
In the camp, he held a position where he could see the execution lists. One day he found the name of his friend Eugeniusz Bendera on one. A friend soon to die.
The two plotted an escape. Two more joined them: the priest Józef Lempart, and Stanisław Jaster, an officer of the Polish Home Army. Each of the four had different work, and those different kinds of work, combined, became one plan. Piechowski, the most fluent in German, took command.
🔧 The Tasks
Bendera was a mechanic. His task was to get a car out of the garage. Piechowski and the others took the warehouse, where the uniforms and weapons were kept.
The groundwork was laid in advance. Piechowski worked loose the latch of the coal hatch he used to fill, so it would not lock when shut. He also made a false key to open the warehouse door.
🎖️ Uniforms and a Car
On the afternoon of June 20, 1942, as the workday was ending, the four disguised themselves as a cart-hauling work detail. They said they were going to haul out rubbish. The guard noted them down without much attention and let them pass.
They entered the warehouse cellar through the coal hatch. They opened the door with the false key and broke into the locked armory with a crowbar. They changed into SS uniforms and took rifles, pistols, and grenades. Piechowski was good with a needle, and sewed the rank insignia onto the uniforms himself.
Bendera went to the garage and chose the fastest car in the camp. A Steyr 220. An SS officer's car. He drove it out and pulled up where the three men in SS uniform were waiting.
🚗 The Gate
The car headed for the front gate. Arbeit Macht Frei — work sets you free. Beneath those words, the barrier was down.
The gate did not open. The car stopped. A guard approached.
Piechowski leaned out the window, showed the rank of an SS officer, and shouted in German. Are you asleep? Open the gate.
The guard hurriedly raised the barrier. The car passed through the gate. There was no gunshot. Had the guard looked closely, he would have seen that the officers' faces were pale and damp with cold sweat.
The day of the escape was exactly two years since the day he was brought to Auschwitz.
🩸 The Price the Others Paid
The four scattered, and they survived. The saying that no one could escape Auschwitz was broken that day.
But the price was paid not by those who left, but by those who stayed. In reprisal, the Nazis brought the parents of Piechowski and Jaster, and the mother of Lempart, to Auschwitz. They died there. Kurt Pachała, the kapo who ran the garage, was suspected of helping and, after torture, was shut in a narrow cell in Block 11, where he died of hunger and thirst.
The share of freedom won by the four was repaid, instead, by parents and a kapo whose faces they never knew.
The escape had wounded the pride of the SS. They made sure it would not happen again. After this escape, Auschwitz began tattooing a number onto the arm of every prisoner. One man slipping out the front gate under a false name remained, on the skin of hundreds of thousands, as a number that could not be erased.
🕯️ Another Prison
Piechowski was never caught by the Nazis again. He joined the Polish Home Army and fought until the war's end.
But one more prison remained for him. The communist regime that took power in postwar Poland imprisoned him again, for taking part in anti-communist resistance. A man who had walked out of a Nazi camp by his own hand was held for seven years under another regime of his own country.
He died in 2017, at the age of ninety-eight. It was seventy-five years after the day he walked out the front gate.
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