Kazimierz Piechowski, early Auschwitz prisoner, dies

Kazimierz Piechowski, a teenage member of the Polish Boy Scouts who became one of the first prisoners at Auschwitz and went on to lead a daring escape from the Nazi death camp, helping to steal the commandant’s car and impersonating an irate SS officer, died Dec. 15 in Gdansk, Poland. He was 98.

The Institute of National Remembrance, created by the Polish government to investigate crimes committed during the Nazi occupation and the later communist rule, announced the death but did not provide additional information.

Piechowski was 19 when German forces swept through Poland and began killing priests, intellectuals and members of the country’s Scouting organization in September 1939, fearing — correctly — that the Scouts would help form the seeds of the country’s underground resistance.

He soon struck out for France, aiming to join the displaced Polish army. But he was captured near the Hungarian border, imprisoned and sent on June 20, 1940, to Auschwitz, which had been opened a month earlier by the SS as a concentration camp for criminals and political prisoners.

Piechowski, who went by Kazik, acquired a new name — Prisoner 918 — and under the threat of death took on a new job: working more than 12 hours a day to expand the forced-labor camp into the core of an elaborate killing center. About 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, would die at Auschwitz before the complex was liberated in 1945, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.

While many were killed in gas chambers disguised as shower installations, some political prisoners, including women and children, were stripped naked and shot in the back of the head outside a “death wall.” For six weeks, Piechowski later said, he was tasked with carting bodies from the wall to a crematorium.

Murder was often seen as sport, or even a means to a vacation. “When an SS man was bored, they would take off a prisoner’s cap and throw it away,” Piechowski told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2011. “They would then order the prisoner to fetch it. As the prisoner was running, the officer would shoot them. Then they would claim the prisoner was trying to escape and get three days off for foiling it.”

Some inmates were beaten to death with batons. Many starved. Only a few — 196, according to the Auschwitz museum — successfully escaped to freedom.

Piechowski enacted his own unlikely escape plan in 1942, two years to the day after he arrived at Auschwitz. He had seen plenty of escapes foiled by the electrified barbed wire and watchtowers surrounding the camp, and knew that 10 people were forced to starve in reprisal for each person who escaped.

Piechowski, too, worked closely with the underground movement known as the Home Army. He was born in the northern Polish village of Rajkowy on Oct. 3, 1919, and grew up in nearby Tczew, where his father worked in the railroad industry and where Piechowski returned before serving with the resistance.

When the communists consolidated power in Poland after the war, Piechowski was sentenced to 10 years in prison as an enemy of the state, according to the London-based Mail on Sunday newspaper. He was released after seven years. He later worked as an engineer in the Gdansk shipyard.

Piechowski returned to Auschwitz with his wife, Iga, some 30 years after his escape. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.