News
Continuation of the Story of the Letter in a Bottle
The director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, presented the rector of the State Higher Vocational School in Oświęcim, Prof. Lucjan Suchanek, with a copy of the letter found on the campus last May. During the war, prisoners built an air-raid shelter there. On September 20, 1944, they walled in the bottle containing a letter to which they affixed their names.
“Immediately after the war, when the commemoration of the Auschwitz site was being considered, one of the ideas was to create a school-monument. Today, we can say that the existence of the State Higher Vocational School is a positive implementation of the intentions from the years 1945-46,” said Cywiński when he conveyed the document. “I strongly believe that a copy of this document, whose history belongs to the school, will be commemorated and displayed there. This is a day that is also highly satisfying in view of the cooperation between the Museum and SHVS,” Director Cywiński added.
A copy was made in the museum conservation workshop by a team of specialists under the direction of Miroslaw Maciaszczyk. In his opinion, it was a challenging task. “We could not find the right paper, so we decided to produce it in our workshop. Thus it is very similar in color and all properties to the original. In addition to copying the message itself, we had—on both sides—to replicate all the dirt and damage, including traces of mold and the scuffing of the paper. I think the result is very satisfactory, and the copy is hard to distinguish from the original,” said Maciaszczyk.
A copy of the document will appear soon in a prominent place in PWSZ. “It fortunately turns out that the renovation of the building where the letter was found has been completed. The display case is waiting. I am very pleased that the original will remain in the museum, because that it is the right place for it. The researchers and conservators are there—everyone who can make use of this document,” said SHVS rector Suchanek.
Contents of the Letter Discovered in a Bottle:
Auschwitz concentration camp 20. IX. 44
“Air-raid shelter for the T.W.L. crew. Built by the prisoners:
N º 121313 Jankowiak Bronisław from Poznań
130208 Dubla Stanisław from Łaskowice, Tarnów powiat
131,491 Jasik Jan from near Radom
145,664 Sobczak Wacław from Konin
151,090 Czekalski Karol from Łódź
157,582 Białobrzeski Waldemar from Ostroleka
A 12,063 Veissid Albert from Lyon (France)
All aged 18 to 20.”
Information about the people on the list
Bronisław Jankowiak
He was born on February 5, 1926, in Poznan. On May 11, 1943, as a result of being falsely denounced as a Jew by a neighbor, he was taken to Auschwitz and received number 121313. On September 20, 1944, when working on the construction of the air-raid shelter for the SS men in the SS warehouse building (Truppenwirtschaftslager, TWL), now belonging to the Oświęcim university, he was the one who wrote the camp numbers and names of the seven prisoners building the shelter on a scrap from a paper cement bag. At the end of the existence of Auschwitz, he was evacuated to a camp in Germany. In April 1945, thanks to the efforts of the Swedish Red Cross chairman, Count Folke Bernardotte, he and other prisoners of various nationalities were sent to Sweden for treatment after being released. There, he met the former Auschwitz prisoner Maria Czarnek, whom he later married. The Jankowiaks stayed in Sweden. They had four children. Bronislaw died on June 21, 1997, and his wife Maria pm November 24, 1999, at the age of 73. Their children and grandchildren also live in Sweden.
The bottle was bricked up in the wall by another prisoner, Waclaw Sobczak (no. 145664), who today is an 84-year-old resident of Wrąbczyn, Wielkopolska.
Wacław Sobczak
Born on September 29, 1923 in a village near Wrąbczyn Słupcy in Wielkopolska. He was arrested in his home village in April 1943 and sent first to a camp in Żabikowo near Poznań. From there, he was deported to Auschwitz on September 3, 1943, in a transport of 115 prisoners. He spent 18 months in Auschwitz. He was 19 when he joined his fellow prisoners in concealing the bottle in the wall. “At that time, we were receiving a quarter-loaf of bread a day, and a bit of turnip soup. Every three months, there was selection. The Germans killed the sick and the weak. We thought we would not survive. We wanted to leave something behind, even if it was only this bottle,” he told reporters.
Karol Czekalski
He was arrested in early 1943, together with his brother Antoni. The Germans accused them of involvement in the clandestine Home Army (AK), to which their parents probably belonged. The Gestapo murdered their father during interrogation at the jail on ulica Anstadt in Łódź and, on September 18, 1943, sent their mother Józefa Czekalska from the women's prison in Łódź to Auschwitz, where she received the number 62664. She died on 23 November. The brothers Antoni and Karol Czekalskich were deported from Łódź to Auschwitz on September 17, 1943. A month later, Antoni was transported to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he survived until liberation. In Auschwitz, Karol was sent to the bricklaying school for young people (Maurerschule). On October 28, 1944 he was transferred to the Flossenbuerg sub-camp in Litomierzyce (Leitmeritz) in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where he fell seriously ill with typhus. He was liberated there in May 1945. Karol Czekalski is now 83 years and lives in Łódź.
The collections of the Auschwitz Museum Archives hold his postwar memoir, in which he wrote that "the trade of bricklayer was taught to us in the attic of block 7 by engineers, technicians and masters, mostly French Jews. . . . With the coming of spring 1944, some of the "students" were considered fit to work and organized into "Luftschutzbunkerbau" labor details to build air-raid shelters."
Albert Veissid
Albert Veissid was born in 1924 in Constantinople, after which he settled in Lyon, France. He worked as a merchant and a musician. He was arrested in July 1943 and eventually sent to Auschwitz on May 30, 1944. Veissid told French media that he did not understand why he was on the list. He recalled that after arriving at the camp he said, on the advice of a friend, that he was a bricklayer. He began working on the construction of the air-raid shelter in a building intended as a warehouse. "I think that was where I met the Polish Christians whose names appear on the list," he said. He added that the prisoners did each other favors. Those who worked in supply stole containers of marmalade, which Veissid concealed. In return, he got an extra helping of soup. Perhaps that's why his name and camp number were added to the list, he conjectured.
Stanisław Dubla
Born in 1926 in Łaskowice, near Lodz. Sent to Auschwitz along with three brothers and his mother (a fourth brother was held in the concentration camp for children on the ulica Przemysłowa in Łódż), on charges that his mother Katarzyna Dubla over a pair of shoes with a German acquaintance who owned a cow that one of her sons tended as it grazed. Three of the brothers survived the war. Stanislaw Dubla was transferred to the Flossenbuerg sub-camp in Litomierzyce (Leitmeritz) in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, probably October 28, 1944. After the war, he returned to hs hometown of Łaskowice. He worked as a bricklayer in Czestochowa. He died in an accident in 1952, when he fell under the wheels of a train.
The story of the other two prisoners on the list, Jan Jasik and Waldemar Białobrzeski, remain unknown.
(based on material from PAP, onet.pl, AFP, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum)
