Most of those who escaped the infamous extermination camp at Auschwitz did so while they were out on a work detail.
But escaping from inside the camp’s barbed wire was something altogether more difficult.
The countryside around Auschwitz was fervently pro-Polish and anti-Nazi. The local population was willing to do whatever it took to aid an escapee.
So the underground partisan movement in the local area and the camp resistance formed a partnership to help people escape.
Auschwitz was part of a series of labor and extermination camps created by the Nazis in occupied Poland. Its first prisoners arrived in May 1940. In June, a Polish boy scout named Kazimierz Piechowski would be imprisoned in Auschwitz I.
In a 2011 interview with The Guardian’s Homa Khaleeli, Piechowski talked about his duties moving the corpses of executed prisoners. He got the work detail because he learned German as a boy scout.
“The death wall was between blocks 10 and 11. They would line prisoners up and shoot them in the back of the head,” he told Khaleeli. “Sometimes it was 20 a day, sometimes it was 100, sometimes it was more. Men, women and children.”
Only 19 when the Nazis occupied his hometown, Piechowski saw his young friends rounded up by German soldiers because of their scouting background. During a run for the Hungarian border he was captured and sent to Auschwitz.
The concentration camp was so new, Piechowski was among those who helped build it.
“Wake up, you buggers!” Piechowski screamed in German. “Open up or I’ll open you up!”
The guard did.
The men drove to the town of Wadowice. All went their separate ways. Piechowski joined the nationalist partisan resistance movement and spent the rest of the war fighting Nazis.
In all, 196 prisoners made an escape from Auschwitz, out of 928 attempts. An estimated 1.1 million Jews, homosexuals, Slavs, Gypsies, and Polish political prisoners were killed in the Auschwitz camp complex.
Kazimierz Piechowski survived the war, spent seven years in a Soviet gulag for joining the Polish Home Army.
He toured to recount stories of his time in a Nazi death camp until his passing in 2017 at the age of 98.
“I am a scout, so I have to do my duty – and be cheerful and merry. And I will be a scout to the end of my life,” he told The Guardian.
Read the full interview at The Guardian’s site.