BIOGRAPHY: Czeslaw M.

Czeslaw M. had been working in the aircraft factory in occupied Warsaw. In August 1940 he was arrested during a road check and deported to Auschwitz concentration camp. At this point the concentration camp had only been in operation for two months. It was not until 27 July 1940 that the first Polish prisoners assigned to start construction of Auschwitz’s main camp arrived there. In just six months the 19-year-old lost 34 kilos, and his hands and feet suffered from frostbite. Czeslaw M. had become a “Musulman”, the name the SS and camp inmates gave to those who, close to dying of hunger and exhaustion, had apathetically resigned themselves to their fate. “If I’d been in Auschwitz just two months longer I would never have survived. I mean, I would probably have finished my life against this wire fence”, says Czeslaw M., summing up his situation then.

In April 1941, with the help of the barracks elder, he managed to get his name put on the list for the transport going to Neuengamme concentration camp. Most of the men on this first transport from Auschwitz were sent to work in the clay pits. Standing in deep mud in wet, cold conditions they had to dig out the heavy clay, shovel it into trolleys and push these into the camp brickworks.

In spring 1943 Czeslaw M. was selected by the SS to join a work gang due to be sent to Drütte satellite camp that was located on the grounds of the “Reichswerke Hermann Göring”. He was one of the few men not deployed in armaments production, but chosen for special duties working directly for the SS. The young Pole was made a sort of manservant for the Hauptsturmführer. He made the SS officer’s bed, cleaned up and brought him food. “And then I went into the kitchen to fetch the man’s coffee, and I stole two tins of canned meat for my comrades. I was betrayed, that’s all, and the SS guard standing at the gate asked me, “What have you got in that canister?” “Coffee”, I answered, and then I had to tip the contents out. Inside were two cans of meat. My punishment was 25 blows with the rod in the presence of all the prisoners, in other words, after work.” As a further punitive measure, he was transferred to the dreaded “block-breaking” unit, one of the toughest work gangs in the factory.

In the night of 7-8 April 1945 the camp was “evacuated” because the Allies were rapidly approaching Salzgitter. The next day, as the train carrying about 3 500 inmates rolled into Celle, it was caught in an air-raid attack by US planes dropping bombs on the station’s freight depot. Probably half of the deportees were killed. The others fled into the surrounding countryside. But once the bombardment was over, the SS, the Volksturm and the Hitler Youth, assisted by civilian inhabitants of Celle, mounted a veritable manhunt of the fleeing prisoners. Czeslaw M., who had managed to escape, recollects: “Hiding behind the trees in the woods were boys of the Hitler Youth firing at the planes (...). When it was all over, they caught sight of us. Those prisoners they managed to catch were ordered to lie down on the ground, then the boys shot them in the head.”

Together with five or six other prisoners he hid out in the woods and was found the next day by American soldiers. Czeslaw M. was brought to a camp for displaced persons set up not far from the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp until he recovered in January 1946. He then returned to Warsaw, by then an utterly ravaged city, and began working as a bus driver.

In April 1992 Czeslaw M. undertook his first visit to the former Drütte concentration camp since the end of the war. Together with other former inmates he tried to describe and focus his memories of their lives in the camp. Today he lives in Warsaw.