Overview

This is the diary of an unnamed twenty-year-old man who spent almost a year in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was released in a hopeless condition-severely weakened, with a bruised kidney and extreme exhaustion. An eyewitness account, it describes the entire process: from accidental arrest in a street roundup, through detention, transport, and placement in the camp. The author presents living conditions, methods of torture, punishments, roll calls, hunger, and forced labour-which, contrary to the well-known slogan above the gate, Arbeit macht frei (""work sets you free""), serves only as a means of degradation, senseless exhaustion, and humiliation of prisoners. He also depicts interpersonal relationships, showing examples of both heroic conduct and disgraceful behaviour. The text was developed by Halina Krahelska in her characteristic style of fictionalized reportage, strictly based on facts and testimonies. It was published anonymously in Warsaw in April 1942 by the Publishing House of the Propaganda Commission of the Office of Information and Propaganda of the Home Army Headquarters under the title Auschwitz. A Prisoner's Diary. Its purpose was to bear witness to the reality of the Nazi concentration camps. Certainly, one of the aims of the publication was to convey to broad segments of Polish society that people did not end up in the camps solely for offenses against the occupying power or for involvement in the resistance. Rather, the camps were filled with people taken by chance-demonstrating that they served as instruments of mass terror and that ""not interfering"" or avoiding anything disapproved of by the Germans offered no real protection. Interestingly, the actual prisoner whose account forms the basis of this text survived. He was Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who, according to his testimony, immediately-already in June 1942-joined the activities of the Union of Armed Struggle, the Front for the Rebirth of Poland, and the Council for Aid to Jews ""Żegota."" He later became a soldier of the Home Army and took part in the Warsaw Uprising.

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