Leonard T. Zawacki, Auschwitz prisoner no. 13390

Leonard Zawacki was born on Jan. 20, 1916, in Grudziadz, Poland, which was under German occupation at the time. He joined the Polish Army and, when Poland surrendered to Germany in 1939, became a non-Jewish prisoner of war. He and his cousin escaped from a German prison and worked in Warsaw, Poland, with the underground until being arrested by the Gestapo in 1940. On Apr. 4, 1941, he was transported to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland, with 1,000 other prisoners. He posed as a carpenter and later, because he could speak German, worked making deliveries and as a clerk. He was active in the underground in Auschwitz and escaped with five other prisoners on Sept. 28, 1944. After his escape, Leonard spent the remainder of World War II as a partisan until liberated by the Soviet Red Army. Immediately after the war, Leonard returned to Auschwitz and recovered some blueprints of Birkenau, also a concentration camp in Poland, in the workshop where he had worked which he turned over to a Holocaust museum in northern Poland in 1958. Leonard traveled to Poland, Italy, and England before immigrating to the United States in 1951.

Leonard T. Zawacki

A copy of the memoir was sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, and a donor agreement was signed in Oct. 1992.