The book is the account of the wartime experiences of one of the first prisoners of Auschwitz concentration camp, who later escaped and went on to play active rolw in the Cracow resistance movement. It is a valuable historical source on the realities of a Nazi concetration camp, the inhuman slave labour, hunger and terror, the executions as well as the ways in which inmates managed to defend themselves and the resistance organisations in and around the camp. This book is exceptional in the succinct, factual way it treats the years of occupation, neither exaggerating nor glossing things over.

Kazimierz Albin was born 1922 in Cracow. In January 1940 he was arrested in Slovakia on his way to France to join the Polish Army that was being formed there. He was in the first transport from Tarnow to KL Auschwitz, where he became prisoner No. 118. In February 1943 he escaped from the camp and went into hiding in Cracow under a changed name. On graduating from an underground cadet school, he became the commander of the Section III Diversionary Fighting Group of the Polish Home Army Cracow-Town Area Command. After the war he studied avation at the Cracow University of Technology. He was one of the founders of the Care for Auschwitz Association.

This publication is available in German, Italian and Polish.