I Survived Hitler's Hell

Prof. A. P. Gwiazdowski

• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787206366
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

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.

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, M...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• MY GRATITUDE TO:
• CHAPTER I - YOUNG REVOLUTIONARY
• CHAPTER II - GERMANS AT WAR
• CHAPTER III - ACCUSATIONS BY THE GESTAPO
• CHAPTER IV - THE HUMAN SLAUGHTER HOUSE
• CHAPTER V - APPEARANCE OF THE NEW GUARD
• CHAPTER VI - GOLD TEETH FOR SLICE OF BREAD
• CHAPTER VII - THREE HUMAN LIVES FOR FIVE PIGS
• CHAPTER VIII - CANNIBALS
• CHAPTER IX - HELP FROM A VOLKSDEUTSCHER
• CHAPTER X - FIGHT FOR LIFE
• CHAPTER XI - LIFE IN PENITENTIARY
• CHAPTER XII - AMONG SEXUAL DEGENERATES
• CHAPTER XIII - GESTAPO UNDERMINED NAZI GERMANY
• CHAPTER XIV - A VICTORIOUS RUSSIAN FROST
• CHAPTER XV - DEATH OR FREEDOM?
• CHAPTER XVI - DEATH MARCH
• CHAPTER XVII - FACE ME, I AM GOING TO SHOOT
• CHAPTER XVIII - FREEDOM AT LAST?
• CHAPTER XIX - WHY DID ALEK SURVIVE?
• CHAPTER XX - EPILOGUE
• A LIST OF MARTYRS
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER