Escaping Hell: The Memoirs of a Polish Underground Officer in Auschwitz and Buchenwald

A.H. Mrozewski is a librarian at Laurentian University.

A valuable addition to the thousands of existing testimonies by
survivors of German concentration camps. At the time of his
imprisonment, Piekarski was a young Polish Cavalry officer and a member
of a clandestine military organization that aimed to liberate Poland
from occupation by both Germans and Soviets. Escaping Hell recounts five
years of confinement in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Camp Rose (near
Weimar). Piekarski belonged to one of the first transports of inmates to
the camps; he was sent to Auschwitz in September 1940, having survived
Gestapo interrogations in Warsaw.

Piekarski’s memoirs are interesting not only for the detailed
description of daily conditions in the camps, but also because while in
Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he continued to be an active member of the
Armia Krajowa (the Home Army). He had been recruited for this most
dangerous assignment by Captain Witold Pilecki, himself a most
remarkable individual whose story has been told elsewhere—see Josef
Garlinski’s Fighting Auschwitz (London, 1975). After the war Piekarski
studied in England. In 1951 he immigrated to Canada and for many years
was professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Waterloo.
He died in 1990 at the age of 75.

Piekarski expresses little desire for vengeance against the
perpetrators of the hideous crimes he describes. In a foreword, he
explains: “unlike several writers about life in concentration camps, I
do not believe that the violence we witnessed or experienced was unique
to our German captors. Extreme cruelty was displayed by Polish,
Ukrainian or even by the most non-violent group among us, Jewish
prisoners. Indeed, it is almost needless to describe violence as a
significant phenomenon without our postwar culture. More significant, I
think, is to recognize this phenomenon as instinctively based and to
combat it with our equally potent ability to reason and understand. Only
then might we prevent the recurrence of events out of which my story is
but a brief moment.”

Escaping Hell has been well edited by Richard Lawrence. If there is one
thing that bothers this reviewer, it is that some of the Polish names
are anglicized (e.g., Thomas for Tomasz, Stan for Stanislaw).