Kazimierz Piechowski (pronounced [kaˈʑimjɛʂ pjɛˈxɔfskʲi]; 3 October 1919 – 15 December 2017) was a Polish engineer, and boy scout during the Second Polish Republic, and political prisoner of the Nazis held at Auschwitz concentration camp. He was a soldier of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), and again became a political prisoner under the post-war communist government of Poland for seven years. He is best known for his escape from Auschwitz, along with three other prisoners.
Kazimierz Piechowski (pronounced [kaˈʑimjɛʂ pjɛˈxɔfskʲi]; 3 October 1919 – 15 December 2017) was a Polish engineer, and boy scout during the Second Polish Republic, and political prisoner of the Nazis held at Auschwitz concentration camp. He was a soldier of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), and again became a political prisoner under the post-war communist government of Poland for seven years.
He is best known for his escape from Auschwitz, along with three other prisoners.
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Kazimierz Piechowskia adăugat o fotografie
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R.I.P Kazimierz
Imprisonment After the collapse of Polish resistance to the German and Soviet invasion, Piechowski along with fellow boy scout Alfons "Alki" Kiprowski (born 9 October 1921), were captured by the German occupiers in their hometown of Tczew and forced into a work-gang, clearing the destroyed sections of the railway bridge over the Vistula, which had previously been blown up by the Polish military to impede Nazi transports. Polish Boy Scouts were among the groups targeted by the Gestapo and the Selbstschutz. Both decided to leave Tczew on 12 November 1939 and attempted to get to France to join the Polish Army. While crossing the border into Hungary, they were captured by a German patrol. They were sent to a Gestapo prison in Baligrod before being transferred to a prison in Sanok, and then to Montelupich Prison in Kraków. Their last stop before Auschwitz was a prison in Wiśnicz. Piechowski was sent to Auschwitz as a political prisoner, a Legionsgaenger – one wishing to join Polish military formations abroad. The Polish Boy Scouts were labeled as a criminal organization in occupied Poland. Piechowski was among a transport of 313 other Polish deportees to Auschwitz on 20 June 1940; it was only…
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Kazimierz Piechowskia adăugat o fotografie
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R.I.P Kazimierz
After the escape The prisoners abandoned the stolen escape vehicle in the vicinity of Maków Podhalański, approximately 60 kilometres (37 mi) from the camp. Piechowski eventually made his way to Ukraine, but was unable to find refuge there due to anti-Polish sentiment. He forged documents and took a false name before returning to Poland to live in Tczew, where he had previously been captured. He soon found work doing manual labor on a nearby farm, where he made contact with the Home Army and took up arms against the Nazis within the units of 2nd Lt. Adam Kusz nom de guerre Garbaty (so-called "Cursed soldiers"). His parents were arrested by the Germans in reprisal for his escape and murdered in Auschwitz. The policy of tattooing prisoners was also allegedly introduced in response to his escape. Piechowski learned after the war that a special investigative commission had arrived at Auschwitz from Berlin to answer, independently of the camp's administration, the question as to how an escape as audacious as that of Piechowski and his companions' was at all possible. This information had come from his boy-scout friend, Alfons "Alki" Kiprowski, who remained a prisoner at Auschwitz for some three more months…
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Kazimierz Piechowskia adăugat o fotografie
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R.I.P Kazimierz
Piechowski's associates Kurt Pachala (or, Pachele; born 16 October 1895), a native of Neusatz (inmate number 24). He was in charge of the motor pool (Fahrbereitschaft; or alternatively, of the food stores, the so-called Truppen Wirtschaftslager) at Auschwitz. Pachala was implicated in Piechowski's escape by the circumstantial evidence uncovered during the ensuing investigation, and as a result, was tortured and sent to the standing cell in Block 11, where he died of thirst and hunger on 14 January 1943. He is said to have been reduced at the end to eating his own shoes. His treatment and death were recounted at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials in 1965 which formed the basis for the 1965 play Die Ermittlung (The Investigation) by Peter Weiss. Pachala is the only known victim of reprisals for the escape within the Auschwitz concentration camp itself (apart from the family members of the escapees). It was the ruse of the fake work commando that saved other prisoners from reprisals. Eugeniusz Bendera (b. 13 or 14 March 1906 in Tschortkau (Polish: Czortków), Podolia), then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. According to Kazimierz Piechowski, Bendera was the originator of the idea of the escape, and the one who conceptualized the…
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Kazimierz Piechowskia adăugat o fotografie
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R.I.P Kazimierz
Bibliography
Kazimierz Piechowski, et al., Byłem numerem... : świadectwa z Auschwitz, ed. K. Piechowski, Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Sióstr Loretanek, 2003, ISBN 8372571228
Kazimierz Piechowski, My i Niemcy, Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Sióstr Loretanek, 2008, bilingual edition: text in Polish and German (the original Polish title, My i Nemcy ("We and the Germans"), is rendered Wir und die Polen ("We and the Poles") in the German section), ISBN 978-8372573087
Szymon Datner, Ucieczki z niewoli niemieckiej, 1939–1945, Warsaw, Książka i Wiedza, 1966, pp. 229–230.
Auschwitz: A New History by Laurence Rees. Publisher: PublicAffairs; export ed edition (2005) ISBN 978-1586483036
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Kazimierz Piechowskia lăsat un gând
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Blown-up bridge at Tczew
The History Guy on his escape from Auschwitz
