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He was a reserve officer of the Polish Army. In 1939, he took part in the defense campaign after the attack of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union on Poland. He ended up in German captivity, from which he escaped in October 1939. In the summer of 1940, he was arrested by the Germans, which began his 5-year ordeal in German-Nazi concentration camps.
He was born in Poznań, which was then in the German Empire. For this reason, he knew German perfectly, which was to be very useful to him during his stay in the camp. After being arrested by the Germans in August 1940, he was sent to Fort VII, which functioned as a prison and concentration camp. About 20,000 people were murdered there, which constituted about half of the prisoners staying there.
Suchowiak stayed in the fort for a very short time, because after a few days he was taken to the Buchenwald camp. The camp near Weimar was also a place of temporary imprisonment for the Pole. After a few months, in December 1940, Bogdan Suchowiak was sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp, located 13 km from Hamburg. On arrival, he received number 3524. Knowledge of German and English and the fact that Suchowiak was a mechanical engineer – as he himself recalled:
not only made it easier for me to survive the long years of the camp, but also gave me a much greater chance – compared to other prisoners – obtaining information about current political events and military activities.
The camp’s prisoners were sent to work in the production of bricks, as well as in the first period of canal construction. This is where most Poles sent to the camp were assigned. Suchowiak described the nature of work on the canal construction as follows:
The work there was gruesome. With a shovel in hand or pushing a wheelbarrow full of mud or sand, prisoners with soaked trouser legs, shivering in wind-lined clothes, had to work from dawn to dusk.
In 1945 the camp was evacuated. Bogdan Suchowiak, pretending to be sick, remained in the camp hospital. He knew that Allied soldiers were approaching from the west, so he remained in the camp and hoped that he would soon regain his freedom. However, on April 21, the Germans decided to evacuate this building as well. The sick unable to move on their own were killed, the rest were rushed towards Lübeck. After two days, Suchowiak, along with the entire transport, was loaded onto the ship “Thielbeck”:
There are no conditions for transporting people. The cargo hatches, located at least 10 meters below the deck, become our room. (…) there is terrible crowding and the lack of the most primitive sanitary conditions (…) instead of toilets, barrels are used, pulled out by ship’s cranes over the heads of prisoners, and their contents are poured onto people’s heads while being pulled out.
“Thielbeck”, like “Cap Arcona”, was bombed by the British Air Force.
One of the planes fires a missile, which hits the ship and penetrates the side (…) The Thielbeck is taking on water and shuddering. Panic is at its peak. Thousands of prisoners are trying to escape from the lower hatches, as if from a trap. Only four ladders give thousands of people little chance. Those who reach them are pushed and pulled down by others.
Once Suchowiak was in the water, he started swimming towards the shore.
I swam in great shape for at least a kilometer. I swam like this for about 2 hours. My legs were stiff. At times it seemed as if I was moving not my own limbs, but some foreign objects. He managed to swim to his destination. He regained his freedom. His reaction to this was significant: “It’s hard to describe my joy! I won, saved my life, achieved my goal, and showed good physical condition in the decisive fight. I had the September Campaign [in 1939] behind me, captivity, escape from captivity, and fifty-seven months that I spent in Nazi Gestapo prisons and concentration camps. And yet – in the decisive moment to save myself, I felt young and strong and decided to fight for my life.