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Stefan Krukowski was a Pole who was caught in a roundup on a Warsaw street. He was sent to a harsh prison, where he was tortured. He was then taken to one of the Nazi concentration camps.
Stefan Krukowski was born in 1919. When World War II broke out, he headed to the front. He fought in eastern Poland, where he ended up in Soviet captivity deep in the Soviet Union. During that time, he often dreamt of his father, which he regarded as a form of protection. During a transport to one of the camps, from which the prisoners, as it later turned out, were executed in Katyń, he dreamt of his father, who told his son to flee. Stefan Krukowski escaped and managed to return to German-occupied Poland.
After being arrested and investigated in 1940, the Germans sent him to the Sachsenhausen camp, from where he was sent after a few weeks to the Mauthausen camp. He described his impressions as follows:
At the time of our arrival at the camp, it was decisively ruled by the ‘greens‘ – criminal prisoners [criminal prisoners had a green triangle sewn on their clothes]. The first red ” winkel” [jargon term for a sewn-on triangle] – on top of that with the letter P {a red triangle with the letter P signified a political prisoner of Polish nationality]. – had an inflammatory effect on them. If one wanted to win the fight for life and for survival, one had to first of all win the fight for power or at least for a piece of that power.
Stefan Krukowski worked in a quarry for nearly three years, where he contracted pneumoconiosis. In mid-1944, he was transferred to the SS uniform warehouse. At first, his only task was cleaning, but thanks to his education and knowledge of the language, its nature changed – he became head of the labor commando, or kapo. This created opportunities for him to “organize,” i.e. steal, for example, food for fellow inmates. However, if a prisoner wanted to survive the camp, he had to organize everything for himself, from food to medicine or clothing. Access to the latter provided an opportunity to trade for other goods, including food for himself or other prisoners. The last days of the camp were very nerve-wracking for the prisoners and, as Stefan Krukowski recalled, also for the camp staff. As he wrote:
I started a conversation with the Kommandoführer, I told him openly that he, whether he went into captivity or not, he could not carry weapons. I took the opportunity to tell him how the Germans acted during the occupation of Warsaw of 1939. (…) After talking with me he was somehow very distracted. He was thinking about the repressions on the population of the occupied country that I had just told him about, and by the method of deduction he was putting himself in the place of a citizen of a country threatened with occupation for many years.
The day of liberation came on May 5. This is how Stefan Krukowski recalled it:
The Kommandoführer ran like a cat with a bladder all morning, and finally around 12 he rushed like a storm into the warehouse <They’re coming!> – he croaked out (…) He threw me a farewell “Keep it up” and disappeared up the stairs. I came out immediately, too. Indeed, downstairs, behind the barrier, clouds of dust were billowing. In a few seconds I rushed into the clothing warehouse, grabbed Danka’s hands and pulled her to the road, on which a large tank with a white star on the turret was majestically rolling (…). Danka stood and cried, and I repeated quickly in my mind “freedom, freedom” and was surprised that it was so easy.
After the war, Stefan Krukowski stayed in Germany for a while, where he enlisted in the Polish Guard Companies, which attached to the American army to guard order in the occupied country. When he heard on the radio in 1946 an appeal from the International Red Cross that his mother was looking for him, he returned with Danka, who became his wife, to Poland. He died in 1980.
