I Survived Hitler’s Hell

By Prof. A. P. Gwiazdowski

Vivid and powerful World War II memoirs by Polish-American mechanical engineer Aleksander Gwiadzdowski, who spent several years in German prisons in East Prussia from 1941-1945.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Jul 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787206366

Prof. A. P. Gwiazdowski

Alexander Peter Gwiazdowski (8 September 1882 - 26 February 1956) was a Polish mechanical engineer. Born in Suwałki, Poland in 1883, he first moved to the USA in 1905. He graduated from Columbia University with a Mechanical Engineering (M.E.) degree in 1910 and went to live in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio. In each city he organized a school for the Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, and Ukrainians. In 1914, Alek became an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Toledo University. In 1918 Alek returned to Poland as the president of a large cooperative and organized the machine tool industry, second only to the American and Swiss in precision, a technical school, a monthly technical magazine, libraries, and a bank. On his return to the U.S. he became Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan in 1928-1934, before moving on to The Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, Ohio. He returned to Poland in 1935 and worked on his treatise, The Selection of Materials, Manufacturing Processes, and Equipment. In 1937, on the request of the Polish Manufacturers’ Association, he went to Warsaw and established a school and a monthly technical magazine, returning to his hometown of Suwałki to write further mechanical handbooks. There he also started an anti-Nazi resistance group called “Revival of the Nation,” forging documents, collected arms, and acting as couriers to the Warsaw underground. He was also the editor of the group’s underground newspaper. He became trapped in German-occupied Poland, was arrested in May 1941, and spent the remainder of the war in several German prisons in East Prussia. He returned to the U.S. in 1945 and remained there until his death in 1956 at the age of 72.

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Text originally published in 1954 under the same title.

© Borodino Books 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

I SURVIVED HITLER’S HELL

By

A. P. GWIAZDOWSKI

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

MY GRATITUDE TO: 5

CHAPTER I — YOUNG REVOLUTIONARY 6

CHAPTER II — GERMANS AT WAR 44

CHAPTER III — ACCUSATIONS BY THE GESTAPO 47

CHAPTER IV — THE HUMAN SLAUGHTER HOUSE 52

CHAPTER V — APPEARANCE OF THE NEW GUARD 58

CHAPTER VI — GOLD TEETH FOR SLICE OF BREAD 62

CHAPTER VII — THREE HUMAN LIVES FOR FIVE PIGS 66

CHAPTER VIII — CANNIBALS 69

CHAPTER IX — HELP FROM A VOLKSDEUTSCHER 70

CHAPTER X — FIGHT FOR LIFE 74

CHAPTER XI — LIFE IN PENITENTIARY 82

CHAPTER XII — AMONG SEXUAL DEGENERATES 88

CHAPTER XIII — GESTAPO UNDERMINED NAZI GERMANY 91

CHAPTER XIV — A VICTORIOUS RUSSIAN FROST 95

CHAPTER XV — DEATH OR FREEDOM? 100

CHAPTER XVI — DEATH MARCH 104

CHAPTER XVII — FACE ME, I AM GOING TO SHOOT 108

CHAPTER XVIII — FREEDOM AT LAST? 113

CHAPTER XIX — WHY DID ALEK SURVIVE? 116

CHAPTER XX — EPILOGUE 118

A LIST OF MARTYRS 123

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 124

DEDICATION

To the millions of men, women, and children who perished in concentration camps, in gas chambers, and under guillotines;

To the heartbroken mothers whose sons and daughters died, because they loved the land of their birth;

To the fearless Polish farmers, to my wife and son, who helped me to save the lives of poor Jews;

To the Jewish martyrs abandoned by their rich coreligionists and rabbis;

To the good-hearted German guards, one of whom saved the life of our son;

To the German women, who were not afraid to show their burning tears at the sight of the handcuffed Polish children

this book is dedicated.

MY GRATITUDE TO:

Professor Mary E. Disher Carney and Mr. Harold C. Halstead for proofreading the manuscript, and to Mr. Jim Donahue for an excellent drawing of a guillotine.

I SURVIVED HITLER’S HELL

CHAPTER I — YOUNG REVOLUTIONARY

Alek was a frail and extremely stubborn high school boy. He had a weak body but his will power was second to none. He was not a brilliant student, if school grades are used as a yardstick of mind’s brilliancy. Russian teachers considered him a serious-minded boy with a good head and a promising career.

That part of Poland where Alek lived was under the Russian occupation and his birthplace was only five miles away from the German border.

Alek hated passionately the czar’s autocratic government and his ambition was to become a Russian officer and to spread the revolutionary propaganda among soldiers. He doubted whether his physical condition would improve sufficiently to make him eligible to the officers’ school.

One day he read a book about Sweden, written by a Polish teacher. She had spent some time in that country and returned to Poland with a glowing account of the Swedish public-school system. She told her readers that the Swedish ministers would set aside their ministerial portfolios and go to villages as country teachers. She wrote about the country’s cooperative movement, its universal cleanliness, the honesty and unselfishness of the Swedes, and their desire to serve and help their fellow citizens.

The story was fascinating, and the boy’s youthful imagination embroidered it. He decided that he must be a teacher.

How could he foresee that that early spark to his imagination was to become a consuming life-long desire not only to acquire education for himself but to experience the joy of dispelling ignorance among others? How could he know that this burning impulse would take him to the brink of death in the world’s greatest struggle, not once, but repeatedly, as he passed from the hands of one warring faction to another and back again?

Then and there, at the age of fourteen, he launched his first teaching project—an underground school for poor Polish boys.

The Russian school regulations did not permit the Polish children to attend school in clogs. They were supposed to wear shoes, but the boys had only clogs or were barefooted. Failure to wear regulation shoes meant exclusion from schools and consequent life-long illiteracy. Misery and illiteracy are the lot of all nations without political independence. The boy had no stipulations about footwear in his school.

When he was sixteen he published an underground paper for high school boys and girls. He made his own printing outfit of gelatine and glycerine at a cost of only seventy-five cents. Thus, he was able to print fifteen copies of an eight-page bi-weekly paper. One copy was regularly placed on the desk of a captain of the Russian secret police, who read it, frothed, and furiously cursed the editor.

After deciding to extend his teaching to the workers, the boy, now a young man, organized shoemakers, tanners, and seamstresses, but even that activity seemed too small a field, for he wanted something bigger, more dangerous, more exciting. He craved thrills.

At that time Alek was a student at the Russian Junior College. There he studied about the vastness of the Russian Empire and heard of such Russian revolutionists as Stenka Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev, who really were the forerunners of communism and the ideological grandfathers of Lenin and Stalin. The students read Pushkin and Lermontov—two great Russian poets—and Tolstoy, Dostoyevskey, and Gogol. All of these men excited their imaginations and prepared them for the coming revolution.

Three great Polish poets, Mickiewicz, Slowacki, and Krasinski, urged them to fight for Poland’s independence. Alek joined Joseph Pilsudski’s party and immediately was given the most responsible party job. It was his business to smuggle revolutionary literature printed in London, Paris, and Geneva across the German border into his city and then to deliver it to some of the most beautiful girls of Poland and Russia for further distribution. These young women traveled thousands of miles from Baku, Petrograd, now Leningrad, Moscow, Riga, Warsaw, and Wilno in order to get an average of fifteen pounds of revolutionary brochures and newspapers. Only the most beautiful could handle this exceedingly dangerous job efficiently, and they carried out their missions successfully.

Because expenses were high, Pilsudski and Stalin with their men robbed banks and government treasuries to finance the revolutionary activities. Alek read Lenin’s fiery appeals to the Russian workers and peasants to overthrow the czar’s government and exterminate land owners and capitalists.

Now, at last, he had all the thrills he wanted. He was as proud as any young man of twenty could be. He was helping to educate one hundred and sixty-nine tribes and nations of the vast Russian Empire: Russians, Poles, Jews, Georgians, Tartars, Cossacks, Kalmouks, and many, many others. He, a mere youngster, was fighting the omnipotent czar.

The Russian police did not like such an educator as Alek.

One Christmas Eve they surrounded his family’s house, searched it thoroughly, accidentally found a few revolutionary brochures, and decided to wait for him.

Alek’s counter-intelligence service notified him ahead of time about the proposed visit, and he watched the police from his hiding place. When Alek’s younger brother Joseph signaled that the police had found the illegal literature, he walked ten miles, forced a Polish peasant at the point of a gun to drive him to the German border, and said goodbye to Poland.

A captain of the Russian secret police made his escape possible. After the captain had been warned that his son, a poor student, might be expelled from classes, the school superintendent recommended Alek as a tutor, and at the end of six months the boy brought home as good grades as any of his classmates. In return, the captain wanted Alek to escape, and thus the Russian police were unsuccessful in their pursuit.

Alek’s mother and friends considered his escape a miracle.

The Russian court sentenced Alek, in absentia, to fifteen years of hard labor in the gold mines of Siberia.

Twenty-nine years later, Marshal Pilsudski’s government, without Alek’s knowledge, conferred on him Poland’s Medal of Independence.

Man is a peculiar animal in his evaluations. The Russians sentenced him to fifteen years of hard labor for the same activity for which the Polish people honored Alek with a few ounces of bronze, a piece of paper, and a pretty ribbon.

In January, 1905, a thirteen-year American interlude began. During this period Alek was able to realize more fully his early desire to teach those who needed enlightenment, wherever they happened to be.

Alek landed in New York with twenty cents in his pocket, two English words in his mouth, and no friends. He met the poorest Poles in that great city. In Poland Alek had been led to believe that dollars grew in America on trees; but in those times, as today, in the financial capital of the world there was appalling misery among the Poles, Italians, and even the Jews. What these people needed was a knowledge of the English language, arithmetic, and drawing. With that in mind, Alek went to the leader of the Polish Socialist Alliance in America, who was an engineer. Patiently he listened to the young man’s story and his ambitious plans.

You can teach the Jews, Germans, Hungarians, and Russians, and, as a matter of fact, the nationals of any other country, but not the Poles. Alexander Debski spoke decisively. They do not care to learn. They prefer to drink and build churches.

The engineer’s wife had an ironical smile in her eyes. It is snowing outside. Go and stand on your head in the snow, and let it cool you off a bit, young man, she added sweetly. She was not a Polish woman.

Alek’s host was close to fifty, and Alex was just over twenty.

Are you a Pole? Alek cried. What have you done to educate these ‘praying drunkards’? They paid for your education, and what have you done for them?

He is a communist! The wife’s voice rose in accusation.

Alek jumped to his feet and left without shaking hands with those two hypocrites and political word-mongers.

Two weeks later