From Space highlights
On this day 20th June 1942.
Polish prisoners of Auschwitz Concentration Camp Kazimierz Piechowski, Stanislaw Gustaw Jaster, Józef Lempart, and Eugeniusz Bendera broke into a SS store room and stole uniforms and weapons and then made their escape from the concentration camp in disguise.
They drove to the main gate – passing SS men who saluted them and shouted Heil Hitler. But for Piechowski, the biggest test was still to come. "There was still one problem: we did not know whether, when we came to the final barrier, we would need a pass. We just planned that I would play the role of an SS officer so well that the guards would believe me."Yet as they approached the barrier, the guard did not move. As he describes what happens next, Piechowski looks away as though he can see the last obstacle before him. "We are driving towards the final barrier, but it is closed . . . We have 80m to go, it is still closed . . . We have 60m to go and it is still closed. I look at my friend Gienek – he has sweat on his brow and his face is white and nervous. We have 20m to go and it is still closed . . ." Bendera stopped the car and as Piechowski stared blankly ahead, not knowing what to do, he felt a blow on his shoulder. It was Lempart. "He whispered: 'Kazik, do something.'"This was the most dramatic moment. I started shouting." The SS guards obeyed and the car drove to freedom – allowing the men to become four of only 144 prisoners to successfully escape Auschwitz.The Nazis were incensed, says Piechowski. "When the commandant heard in Berlin that four prisoners had escaped he asked: 'How the bloody hell could they escape in my own car, in our own uniforms, and with our ammunition?' They could not believe that people they did not think had any intelligence took them [for a ride]."Keeping away from the main roads to evade capture, they drove on forest roads for two hours, heading for the town of Wadowice. There they abandoned the Steyr and continued on foot, sleeping in the forest and taking turns to keep watch. Lempart became ill and was left with a parish priest, while Jaster returned to Warsaw. Piechowski and Bendera spent time in Ukraine before Piechowski returned to Poland, joining the partisan Polish Home Army and spending the rest of the war fighting the Nazis.
Most prisoner escapes took place from worksites outside the camp. The attitude of local civilians was of immense importance in the success of these efforts. The Auschwitz commandant wrote in July 1940 to the commander of SS and police in Wrocław that “the local population is fanatically Polish and . . . ready to do anything against the hated camp SS garrison. Every prisoner who manages to escape can count on all possible help as soon as he reaches the first Polish homestead.”
The first escape came on July 6, 1940, at the very beginning of the existence of Auschwitz. A Pole, Tadeusz Wiejowski, made his way out of the camp with the help of Polish civilian workers employed in the camp. He escaped in the disguise of such a worker. Five Polish workers were incarcerated in the camp for aiding him. Only one survived, but he died shortly after the war.
In the fall of 1941, the local AK organization took care of seven escaped Soviet POWs, accepting two of them in its Sosienki partisan unit and smuggling the others to resistance units in the mountains.
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