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Auschwitz, the most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps, was the site of over a million deaths. With its heavily fortified gates, watchtowers, and fences charged with electricity, the possibility of escape seemed impossible.
Out of the estimated 900 prisoners who attempted to flee, most were caught and executed. However, 144 people managed to escape the horrors of the death camp and survive. Here are the stories of 10 individuals who succeeded in escaping Auschwitz.
10. Eugeniusz Bendera
When Kazimierz Piechowski, the famous Auschwitz escapee, fled the camp, he was accompanied by three lesser-known men. One of them was Eugeniusz Bendera. While many aspects of his early life remain unclear, he showed as much courage as Piechowski in helping orchestrate the escape.
Bendera was a Ukrainian car mechanic at Auschwitz, where he formed a friendship with Piechowski. When a resistance member informed Bendera that he was about to be executed, he turned to Piechowski, a former Boy Scout and fellow resistance fighter, for help.
The two men quickly devised a daring escape plan.
On June 20, 1942, Piechowski, Bendera, and two other men pushed a cart filled with garbage through the main camp into a storage block. While three of them stole officers’ uniforms, Bendera went to the garage, used a duplicate key, and took the fastest car available. He drove to the hiding spot where his friends were waiting.
As they neared the main gate, Piechowski yelled for the SS guards to open it. Once the guards complied, the four men drove out of Auschwitz. They traveled on rural roads for hours before abandoning the car and escaping into a Polish forest. Bendera eventually settled in Warsaw, where he lived until his death in the 1980s.
9. Tadeusz Wiejowski
The first person to successfully escape Auschwitz was Tadeusz Wiejowski, a Polish shoemaker. He had arrived at the camp on the first prisoner transport on June 14, 1940. His escape was aided by five Polish workers who were employed at the camp.
On July 6, 1940, Wiejowski disguised himself as one of the workers and walked out of Auschwitz with them. Once outside the camp, the men provided him with food and money, and Wiejowski boarded a freight train to flee the area.
The five Polish workers who helped him were interrogated at Auschwitz, leading to the deaths of four of them. The fifth man passed away shortly after the war ended. After his escape, Wiejowski returned to his hometown, where he lived in hiding for a year. He was eventually discovered, arrested, and sent to Jaslo jail, where he was executed.
8. Rudolf Vrba
Rudolf Vrba, born in Czechoslovakia in 1924, became the first person to give a firsthand account of Auschwitz, exposing the true horrors of the camp. Arrested in 1942, he was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp and then to Auschwitz.
Upon it being discovered that he spoke German, Vrba was assigned to work in a storeroom, where he sorted the belongings of those murdered by the Nazis. Eventually, he became the camp registrar, gaining direct access to witness the atrocities of the gas chambers and crematoriums.
In 1944, Vrba, alongside fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler, hid under a pile of logs at a construction site. Although they occasionally heard search dogs nearby, the two men escaped at night after three days of hiding and crossed into Slovakia.
In Zilina, Slovakia, they met with Jewish leaders and compiled a detailed report exposing the reality of Auschwitz. The report was sent to the US and British governments, the Vatican, the Red Cross, and Hungarian Jewish leaders.
The report warned Vrba that Hungarian Jews were about to be transported to Auschwitz. Unfortunately, the Hungarian Jewish leaders failed to alert their community, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews at the hands of the Nazis.
After the war, Vrba married, had a daughter, and relocated to British Columbia. There, he became a professor of pharmacology.
7. Jerzy Bielecki
Jerzy Bielecki, a Polish Catholic, managed to escape Auschwitz in 1944, saving a young Jewish woman’s life in the process. He had been brought to Auschwitz in 1940 and was one of the camp's earliest prisoners.
Bielecki was assigned to work in the grain warehouse. In 1943, he met Cyla Cybulska, a young Jewish woman who worked there mending burlap sacks. They secretly began communicating, and eventually, they fell in love.
Realizing that Cyla's life was in imminent danger, Bielecki started plotting their escape. He managed to acquire an SS uniform, a forged pass, and a document claiming he was a guard escorting Cyla to a farm for work. The plan succeeded, and the two of them were able to leave through the main gate.
For ten days, they journeyed through fields before taking refuge in Bielecki’s uncle’s house. As the war neared its end, they separated to reduce the risk of capture, but both promised they would reunite once the war was over.
Cyla was incorrectly informed that Bielecki had been killed. Bielecki, in turn, was told that Cyla had escaped to Sweden and died. These reports were wrong. The two reunited in June 1983, but did not rekindle their relationship. In 1985, Bielecki was honored with the Righteous Among the Nations award by Yad Vashem for saving Cyla's life.
6. Simon Gronowski
Simon Gronowski, a young Jewish boy from Belgium, was only 11 years old when he and his mother were forcibly loaded into a cattle car bound for Auschwitz. Simon's father had managed to escape the Nazis, and the determined boy was resolved to join him. A group of men in the cattle car managed to pry open the door of the moving train, and Simon leapt out.
As the train slowed and shots were fired in his direction, Simon sprinted toward the nearby forest. He wandered through woods and fields all night. Eventually, he stumbled upon a village, where he knocked on a door and met a woman who took him to the local police.
The policeman, Jan Aerts, suspected Simon had escaped a Nazi transport and decided to help. He gave Simon food and new clothes and sent him on a train to Brussels, where his father lived. Simon was reunited with his father, and they both survived the remainder of the war by hiding with Catholic families.
Tragically, Simon's mother, Chana, and his sister, Ita, were killed at Auschwitz. After the war, Simon settled in Brussels, where he became a lawyer and jazz musician. He later married and started a family.
For 50 years, Simon rarely spoke of his wartime experiences. Eventually, he decided to write a book and began speaking at schools, encouraging children to defend freedom and promote peace in their countries.
5. Witold Pilecki
Witold Pilecki holds the unique distinction of almost certainly being the only person to voluntarily enter Auschwitz and later escape from it. A 39-year-old Polish war veteran, he fought against the Nazis and became a member of the Polish resistance.
After hearing harrowing accounts of Auschwitz, the resistance realized they needed to send someone to gather information from inside the camp. Pilecki volunteered. Under an alias, he allowed himself to be arrested in 1940.
Pilecki spent three years in Auschwitz, collecting intelligence and secretly writing three reports about the conditions in the camp, including its shift from a prison to an extermination center. He also established a resistance network, known as the Union of Military Organization, which included over 500 inmates inside the camp.
In April 1943, Pilecki planned an escape in hopes of convincing the Polish resistance to launch an attack on Auschwitz. On April 26, he and two other prisoners were working in the bakery outside the camp. When the SS guard turned his back, they made their escape.
Pilecki made it to Warsaw but was unable to persuade the resistance to launch an assault on Auschwitz. He then took part in the Warsaw Uprising but was captured by the Nazis and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.
In April 1945, Pilecki was freed by the US Army. He soon joined the II Polish Corps in Italy as an intelligence officer. However, in 1947, he was arrested by Polish communist authorities, tortured, and later subjected to a show trial before being executed by the communist regime.
His final resting place remains a mystery to this day, though it is believed to be in the Powazki Military Cemetery in Warsaw.
4. Herman Shine
Herman Shine successfully escaped from Auschwitz with his childhood friend, Max Drimmer. Born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Shine was denied German citizenship because his father was born in Poland.
Shine and Drimmer were first sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1939 before being transported to Auschwitz in October 1942. Both were assigned to work as construction laborers at the Buna/Monowitz subcamp, located outside of Auschwitz.
While working on the construction site, they met a Polish civilian named Jozef Wrona, who helped them organize their escape. On the night of September 20, 1944, they hid in a ditch, eventually walking 16 kilometers (10 miles) to Wrona’s farm.
At the farm, they spent four months hidden in the barn until the Soviet Army began pushing the Germans back. Afterward, the men found refuge with another Polish family until the war ended. Eventually, they made their way back to Berlin.
Later, Shine and Drimmer married their respective girlfriends in a joint ceremony, and both couples emigrated to California. They devoted much of their lives to Holocaust education, sharing their story. After Drimmer’s passing, Shine continued to tell their story of survival and lifelong friendship.
3. Jan Komski
Jan Komski, born in Poland in 1915, managed to escape from Auschwitz and went on to survive four more concentration camps. A gifted artist, he graduated from the Krakow Art Institute in 1939, just before the Nazi invasion of Poland.
In February 1940, Komski made the resolute decision to flee Poland and head to France, where a Free Polish Army was being formed. However, he was captured by the Germans while en route and was sent to Auschwitz.
Komski arrived at Auschwitz in June 1940 as part of the first transport. He was given prisoner number 564 and assigned to work in the architecture office, where he contributed to the expansion of the camp.
By the winter of 1942, over 150,000 prisoners were held at Auschwitz, with the majority of them dead by the time Komski managed to escape in 1942. Along with three fellow inmates, he made a bold escape on December 29, 1942.
One of the escapees, Kuczbara, disguised himself in a stolen SS uniform and rode in a horse-drawn cart, while the other three prisoners, still in their striped uniforms, walked alongside. When they reached the gate, Kuczbara presented a forged pass to the guard.
The guards were deceived, allowing the men to pass through the gate and escape the camp. They then sought refuge at the home of a Polish resistance fighter, who provided them with new clothes and a safe place to hide.
However, Komski's journey was far from over. He was soon arrested again in Krakow. Due to carrying different identity papers, he was not recognized, and his life was spared. He was imprisoned and eventually transferred to four different camps: Buchenwald, Gross-Rosen, Hersbruck, and Dachau. Komski was at Dachau when it was liberated by the US Army.
After the war, Komski was placed in a displaced persons camp in Munich, where he married a fellow Auschwitz survivor. The couple immigrated to the United States and settled in Washington, DC. There, Komski worked as an artist for The Washington Post for many years, continuing to paint until his passing in 2002 at the age of 87.
2. August Kowalczyk
August Kowalczyk served as a soldier in the Polish army and was captured by the Germans in 1940. He was sent to Auschwitz, which, at the time, primarily housed Polish dissidents and prisoners of war.
On June 10, 1942, Kowalczyk was among 50 prisoners who attempted to escape from Auschwitz. The men were assigned to fieldwork that day, and while most were shot as they tried to flee, Kowalczyk managed to survive.
Kowalczyk was one of the nine prisoners who successfully escaped. He found refuge with various families just 12 kilometers (7 miles) from the camp. After seven weeks, he joined a branch of the Polish Home Army in the Miechow region.
After the war, Kowalczyk became a prominent actor in Poland, appearing in both stage and film productions. He was most famous for his one-man play, Prisoner 6804, where he shared the story of his escape. He performed this play at over 5,000 schools across Poland.
Kowalczyk passed away in 2012 at the age of 90. He was a courageous man who dedicated much of his life to sharing the harrowing truths of Auschwitz with the world.
1. George Ginzburg
George Ginzburg was born into a Jewish family in Berlin. When the Nazis rose to power, he joined the German resistance. In 1942, he was arrested for his anti-Nazi activism and spent three months in jail before being sent to the main camp at Auschwitz, a place where survival was almost impossible.
Years later, Ginzburg recalled his survival, calling himself one of the fortunate ones. As a motor mechanic by trade, he was assigned to work at a factory located outside the camp.
In 1945, as the Soviet army advanced, the SS grew desperate and forced 58,000 Auschwitz prisoners, including Ginzburg, on a brutal two-day march through the snow to awaiting trains. During the march, Ginzburg saw the Nazis' disarray and seized the chance to flee.
He collected discarded cigarette butts left by the guards, rubbing them on his body to disguise his scent in case the Nazis released dogs to track him. He also placed a stick under his blanket to create the illusion of a hidden rifle and pretended to be a German officer.
Ginzburg approached a German soldier and asked for a cigarette. When the guard turned to ask another soldier for one, Ginzburg seized the moment, rushing away and tumbling down a snow-covered hill. He continued his solitary journey through the forest.
Upon discovering the body of a dead Russian soldier, Ginzburg seized the opportunity, taking the uniform and donning it. After two days, he was discovered by Soviet soldiers, who took him in and offered him food.
Eventually, Ginzburg made his way back to Berlin, where he was reunited with his mother, who had survived the war in hiding. He worked as an interpreter for the US Army, served with the Israeli police, and eventually moved to Australia to start a new chapter of his life.
