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Tak było... (The Way It Was...) - Auschwitz through the Eyes of a Polish Political Prisoner

“In writing my memoirs and reflections on the events that took place in the camp, I have presented what I experienced and saw,” said Andrzej Łępkowski, former Auschwitz prisoner number 95845, about the newest Publication by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.

The memoirs consist of three parts. In the first of them, “Birkenau—The Death Camp,” Łępkowski describes how he was sent, along with his father and brother, to Auschwitz from the prison in Tarnów. Next come “disembarkation” at a station near the Birkenau camp, admission to Birkenau, a stay in preliminary quarantine in the men’s camp, and labor at the construction of the crematoria, dredging of the fish ponds, and expansion of the camp.

Łępkowski presents a vivid account of the tragic aspects of life in Auschwitz—the starvation, the diseases that tormented the prisoners, and the mistreatment by SS men and some prisoner functionaries. He also offers contrasting examples of the ways prisoners helped each other, enabling those who were on the verge of death to survive. The second part of Łępkowski’s memoirs, titled “The SS Physicians,” recounts his stay in the infirmary and the camp hospital. Assigned to labor there as a janitor, he saw how the hospital functioned, especially when Jewish patients regarded as unfit for further labor were “selected” for death in the gas chambers.

In the third section, “Remainders,” Łępkowski describes a visit to Birkenau in 1946, when the Soviet authorities were using it as a camp for German prisoners of war. The places he had last seen a year earlier, when he left on an evacuation transport to Buchenwald, reminded him of events he had so recently participated in and witnessed.

Andrzej Łępkowski - Tak było [The Way It Was]
Copy editor: Jadwiga Pinderska-Lech
Cover design: Piotr Kutryba
Publisher: Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2006
12 x 19 cm., 80 pp.
ISBN 83-60210-11-X