An SS-man Edward Lubusch who escaped from Auschwitz

Entangled in a love story of a Pole and a Jewish girl

Edward Lubush was born in 1922 in Polish Bielsko. His father was a German and his mother was a Pole, so Edward was speaking two languages fluently. Despite having a Polish mother he identified himself with his father’s nation. His family was living in Polish-German community, so in the earlier years of his childhood the boy had friends of both citizenships. At heart however he was a German – he thought like a German and wanted to live like a German and that decision had a great impact on his future career. His parents supported that belief, the more that a political situation between Germany and Poland was getting gradually hectic just before the Second World War and being German was simply much safer than being a Polish, but also because being a citizen of the nation which country regained their independence recently (1918), was just less comfortable.

Edward Lubusch (1822 – 1979).

Poland, one of the oldest European Christian countries, founded in 10th century and known as one of the few largest empires in Europe was completely defeated by Russia and Germany in 17th century and went under Russian-German-Austrian occupation for 123 years which resulted in erasing the country out of the world’s map. Despite many national uprisings, Poland managed to get their independence only after the end of the First World War. So, in the interwar period (so called interbellum) there was a deep economic and political crisis, as the country wasn’t strong enough yet. In the thirties of the 20th century Hitler’s National Socialistic ideology started to rise and the tempers between Aryan race (which German identified themselves as people with blonde hair and blue eyes and the ancient Nordic origins) and other nationalities started getting gradually hectic. In his manifest “Mein Kampf” (“My Fight”) Hitler called Aryans as “the master race” while Poles and other people of Slavic origin were put in the lower position in his racial ideology to be allowed to live only in order to do the slavery work. The lowest position was destined for Jews, who were supposed to all be killed like rats. In the last years of the thirties, Hitler’s ideology and the German youth organisations (like Hitlerjugend) were disseminated throughout Germany which resulted in an immediate worsening relationship between Germans and Polish living together in the same community in many Polish towns on the border with Germany.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925.

Lubusch was never proud of his Polish origins and definitely took the side of his father’s nation considering himself as a German. According to Franciszek Karczmarczyk, Lubusch classmate; Edward, as a young boy protested aloud against the obligation of speaking Polish language mandatory in the Polish school he attended. This resulted in expelling him from the school in 1939 but never destroyed his love for German language and culture. On the contrary, he started to consider himself as a German even more, so once the Second World War broke out he voluntarily joined the German SS Force. Later he volunteered for work in Auschwitz. In 1942 he got married to a German girl with Polish origins and the next year he became a father – his son was born in 1943. They lived in Wadowice, not very far from the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz.

Edward’s and Marta’s Lubusch wedding photo, 1942.

Working in Auschwitz wasn’t Lubusch’s idea but his mother’s. She wanted her son to be safe and stay away from the hell of the war front. His elder brother died during the battle so Edward accepted his mother’s proposal and applied to Auschwitz. As he said later, he wasn’t entirely aware of what the Nazi concentration camps really were and had no idea about the ferocity of soldiers who worked there. Officially at the beginning, Auschwitz was a camp for political prisoners but over time it became the Nazi death factory where averagely 1.3 million people died, 90% of whom were Jews.

Auschwitz, 1940 – 1945.

The historian of the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Phd. Adam Cyra, said that among 8 thousand of SS-men, Edward Lubusch was perceived by prisoners as a good man, the only one SS-man, who was indulgent towards people. He was the only one according to current research, who was able to keep his humanity in times of terror when human lives had no value, when people were killed like rats only because of their origin. Despite his work in the death factory he tried not to attend any brutality which was typical behaviour of an average Auschwitz SS-man. It was so easy for an SS-man to kill a prisoner without any reason, moreover, according to the camp’s law, they were rewarded with three days of a rest leave for killing those ones who were going to escape from the camp if only the intention of illegally escaping from the camp was adequately proven. This law allowed them to play one of the most vicious games with the prisoners which now might seem like a scene from horror movies: An SS-man orders a convict to give him his hat and then throw it away far beyond the camp’s boundary line, the crossing of which was equivalent with the intention of escape and thereby getting a death sentence. Then he asks a prisoner to fetch the hat. If he does, an SS-man shoots him immediately and reports to Gestapo (the German Police) that he killed a prisoner escaping from the camp and officially is awarded with three days of the rest leave. If a prisoner refuses to fetch the hat, an SS-man shoots him for failure to carry out his order, which was an ordinary punishment for rebelling convicts, but he couldn’t get any special award for killing him this way. Such camp laws resulted in an increase of cruelty among the SS-men who started simply to kill prisoners in many ways only for fun or personal benefit.

A scene from a movie: The Schindler’s List, 1993.

Prisoners who talked about life in Auschwitz confirmed that Edward Lubusch didn’t play any cruel games with prisoners, on the contrary, they admitted he was rather gentle and considerate. However his serenity was his weakness, the commanders didn’t like that feature, so Lubusch was punished many times officially because of his inadequate behaviour. At one time he was sent to the SS convict settlement where he was supposed to learn how to treat the prisoners heavy-handedly, how to be a real SS-man, not a weak coward who had no courage enough to hit or kick a prisoner. The result of Lubusch’s punishment was actually totally opposite of what they expected. He did not only object to abuse the prisoners, but paradoxically his consideration increased significantly. He was eager rather to show his sympathy to the prisoners instead of treating them brutally in accordance with the Auschwitz regulations which not only required the SS-men to ruthlessly enforce camp’s law but also allowed various forms of cruelty such as beating, humiliating, sexual abuse, denunciation, rejecting daily food portions or even killing in anger. He learnt in time however he shouldn’t openly show his sympathy unless he wanted to be punished again. He quickly understood that by sympathising with the prisoners he simply put himself in jeopardy from the SS commanders and Gestapo, so he started to behave more carefully and never showed again his affection for the convicts.

Auschwitz women sorted through shoes from the killed Hungarian Jews, 1944.

According to Stanisław Trynka who was held in Auschwitz, Edward Lubusch might have saved many people with his attitude. In 1942 he ran the locksmith’s shop in Auschwitz where several prisoners worked. Since he could decide for himself who to recruit, he rather chose those ones who had no strength for work and needed to be regenerated. Of course he required them to work hard but never overstated his expectations and looked after them, making sure his workers had all their daily meals and medicines. But according to Kazimierz Wandowski, a former Auschwitz prisoner, Lubusch didn’t do it selflessly, but in exchange for a considerable amount of soap which he collected for free from the soap store. At the beginning he was beating prisoners, as all the SS-men did, but over time his behaviour changed. It was nothing strange when he sat among the prisoners, joking and laughing – as long as he hadn’t been reported to the SS camp headquarters. Some of the prisoners became his friends. The convicts returned the favour many times. For example, as was said by the former prisoner, Artur Krzetuski, they efficiently concealed the fact that Lubusch shouted the Polish national anthem “Mazurek Dąbrowskiego” which begins with the words “Poland hasn’t died yet while we are alive”. Another prisoner; Kazimierz Smoleń and later the general director of the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, recalled the day when drunk Lubusch started shooting Hitler's portrait. His subordinates managed to overpower him and later they masked the holes in the portrait so nobody could realise what had really happened. The next morning the portrait looked brand-new… According to other witnesses who survived Auschwitz, SS-man Lubusch told Polish prisoners he was deadly ashamed to be a German after seeing what was happening in Auschwitz.

The SS-man Edward Lubusch in his locksmith’s shop in Auschwitz, 1943.

One of the most famous acts of Lubusch’s help to prisoners was his involvement in the escape from Auschwitz for the couple of young lovers: a Polish boy Edek Galiński and a Jewish girl Mala Zimetbaum who met in Auschwitz in the last months of 1943.

Mala was a prisoner of Auschwitz but, as a well educated Polish-Belgian Jewish girl who knew few languages, she worked in one office and translated documents into German, French, Italian, Polish, Dutch and Russian. She was very much loved by the female prisoners, showed them often a lot of sympathy and helped whenever she had a chance. Their fellow inmates remembered her as a person, who helped them write letters to their families to say good bye – when they realized that they would not survive the hell of the Nazi camp.

Mala Zimetbaum, Auschwitz, 1943.

Edek Galiński was a Polish intellectualist, who was arrested by German soldiers in 1940 in the action “AB” the aim of which was to arrest most of Polish scientists, doctors, professors and other intellectualists and send them to the Nazi concentration camps to death. It was obvious if the leaders were dead, the rest of the nation would come into line with Germans. He was working in the Lubusch locksmith’s shop where they both met and became true friends.

Edek Galiński, Auschwitz, 1940.

Edek and Mala fell in love in Auschwitz, they enjoyed each moment they could spend together. It was like looking for the second best of normality in hell… They managed to find moments for themselves for talking, walking, dreaming dreams about their future, all this in the shadow of cremation ovens which were working all day and night, burning the bodies of prisoners killed there. All that death, pain and sorrow of thousand people seemed to be not more important than their love which was stronger than any fear.

Personal belongings of prisoners sent to the gas chamber, Auschwitz.

Many years after liberating Auschwitz, Wiesław Kielar, one of Edek’s true friends who survived the hell of the Nazi concentration camp, wrote a book “Anus Mundi” which was about Auschwitz and the two lovers. Most of the details of their love story written in this article are taken from there, but the book was classified as non-fiction, and as such one can be used as a historical source. After publicizing the book he revealed even more secrets from the love story, such as the fact that Edek and Mala not only fell in love with each other but were also able to have their sex life in the camp. It wasn't easy at all in those conditions, where prisoners slept in large barracks, men and women put separately in different buildings, on average 1000 people in one barrack, three persons in one bed under only one blanket. The camp was overcrowded, new transports of convicts arrived every day and everyone had the impression that there were more and more prisoners in the barracks even if more than a thousand people were killed every day. The place where they made love was absolutely unexpected and no one would believe in that unless Wiesław Kielar revealed this once during an interview. It was an X-ray bed in the experimental block no. 10 in Auschwitz, where doctor Mengele and Schumann run medical experiments on men and women trying to heal some diseases or wounds by irradiation with x-ray and also checking how many times a person can have x-ray until their body cells start to die and how quickly the x-ray effects progress in human body. That bed used to kill people, to sterilise prisoners, but it was also the place of carnal love between Edek and Mala.

A kindergarten in Auschwitz, little prisoners in striped uniforms.

Joseph Mengele is called today as “The Angel of Death.’’ Hardly anyone could survive after they were accepted into Doctor Mengele experimental ward. He was an SS-man and a doctor of medicine with a PhD degree. He looked like a movie lover but the bestiality of his actions had no limit. He conducted pseudo-medical experiments on children and adults. Officially his research focused on multiple pregnancies, cancer, genetic inheritance and racial purity. He also ordered the kindergarten in Auschwitz where all the children were admitted. He was always very nice and smiling so children liked him and called him a good uncle. Later it turned out he used these children in his medical experiments. One of his aims was to learn, if there was any body connection between twins, so he admitted about 1500 twins to his ward. One of Mengele’s most absurd experiments was his attempt to turn the twins into the Siamese twins by fusing their internal organs, veins, or particular parts of bodies. As a result of that practice, no fewer than 100 twins survived his experiments but most of them remained disabled and were taken to the gas chamber to die. Hardly any of them survived Auschwitz. After the liberation of Auschwitz Mengele was imprisoned but managed to escape. He was never captured and died in 1979 in Switzerland as Wolfgang Gerhard. His identity was confirmed by DNA tests in 1992.

Children from Mengele’s experimental block no.10, Auschwitz.

Galiński was a friend of the SS-man… he took a risk and initiated Lubusch in the escape plan and the SS-man agreed to help the lovers at the end. He gave Galiński his own SS uniform with all the military decorations and a pistol with three rounds. The young boy, disguised as an SS-man took the girl out of the Auschwitz camp on 24th June, 1944. After passing the wire fence of Auschwitz, Mala took off her striped uniform that all the Auschwitz prisoners had to wear, under which he wore an ordinary dress. Everyone who met them could only think that they were a couple in love: a German SS-man and a Polish girl. They were running 13 days. They dreamt of starting a family and living a life somewhere off the beaten track. They began to believe that their dreams would come true and fortune would smile at them. And then they met a German SS patrol. It was 7th July 1944. German soldiers immediately recognised Mala’s Jewish facial features and when they took them to a search they saw the numbers tattooed on their arms: the identification of inmates in German concentration camps. Thus it became clear the couple were in fact the fugitive prisoners of Auschwitz. As a result Edek and Mala were sent back to Auschwitz and put in the death cells for the penalty of escape. Before they heard their death sentences they were tortured to reveal the names of people who helped them to escape. The most important question asked by Gestapo was who gave them the SS uniform and weapon. Despite the brutality of the perpetrators, both Edek and Mala said nothing about the SS-man Lubusch and his involvement in that case. When the sun went down and the whole camp plunged into the night, Edek sang loudly or whistled to let Mala know that he was still alive.

A gas chamber in Auschwitz, prisoners went there naked as they were told it was a shower place.

Their love ended just like in Shakespeare's drama. They were used as a terrifying example of what would happen if anyone wanted to escape from the camp. Edek was sentenced to death by hanging. He climbed onto a stool, put his head into a noose, and kicked the stool even before the death sentence reading was completed. It was totally against the Germans bureaucracy so an SS-man jumped quickly to save Edek’s life and put his feet on the stool again. Before he died he exclaimed: “Long Live Pol…”. It was supposed to be “Long Live Poland'' but he was hanged before he could finish.

The cremation buildings in Auschwitz.

Mala died on the same day, but her execution was far more dramatic. She was sentenced to death by being burnt alive in a cremation incinerator. It was unacceptable, so Mala tried to commit suicide by cutting her veins with a tiny razor blade. Perhaps she would have done so but she was caught by SS-Aufseherinnen, the female SS prison guard, who took the razor away and defeated Mala’s intention. Before she was killed the nurses strapped her wounds very slowly believing that she would bleed out before the death sentence was carried out. She was still alive when they transported her in a wheelbarrow and put her into the cremation incinerator. Nobody really knows how it ended. Some people said that one SS-man shot her to end her anguish, but others claimed that she died burnt alive inside. Edek and Mala died tragically in Auschwitz on 22nd August 1944 but there is still a souvenir that remains and is survived on them. When they were dating in Auschwitz each of them cut the coil of their own hair, which later they exchanged with each other and kept them under their striped uniforms locating them right on their hearts as a promise of future love and marriage. These coils are now covered with scraps of paper and placed on exhibition in the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Cremation incinerators, Auschwitz.

Immediately after the lovers died, Lubusch decided to desert Auschwitz. He was truly aware that any help he had shown the prisoners could be revealed at any moment. It would be enough to torture one of the employers of his locksmith to induce him to reveal his name as a person who enables the lovers to escape. As he decided, one day he just left his home on his motorcycle but he never made it to the Auschwitz camp. His sympathy for Poles made him ultimately change his mind, so he turned away from the German nation and Hitler’s ideology and took the side of the Polish nation, those days still occupied by Germans during the Second World War. As Daria Czarnecka, a volunteer from the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, said, he probably got involved in the Polish AK Force and started to fight against Germans. He was valued by all his comrades in the army because he could speak German fluently and had the SS uniform which was very useful in some military actions like recapturing the Polish prisoners from German jails. He was arrested in the end of 1944 when he decided to visit his wife and child at their place of living in Wadowice. He never knew that his house was under constant Gestapo surveillance after his desertion from Auschwitz. He realised the house could be under German’s control, but he couldn’t bear the separation from his family any longer. He was transferred to the prison for SS-men in Berlin, Germany, where he was sentenced to death. However, the execution of the sentence was interrupted by a fire in the city that broke out as a result of the final fighting of the Second World War. Chaos ensued in the prison gave him actually a chance to escape, which he took immediately. It was March, 1945. During the escape, he found the corpses of a Polish soldier, so he seized his clothes, documents and his identity. That time in Berlin the SS-man Edward Lubusch died, and Bronisław Żołnierowski, reborn, returned to Poland. After he arrived in Poland he managed to find his family. They could no longer use the Lubusch name, because it was a name of an SS-man from Auschwitz, who was automatically sentenced to death as a war criminal. The truth about his real identity was revealed many years later.

Bronisław and Marta Żołnierowicz, 1955.

Edward Lubusch hid his name for 39 years and was always afraid of anyone who would denounce him to Russian communists occupying Poland after the Second World War and tell them about his duty in Auschwitz. After the end of the war, all the SS-men who worked in all the concetration camps and attended any form of genocide of Jews and Poles were sentenced to death. The Lubusch name was on this list as well, so he has no choice but to hide. He was obviously aware that the communist Polish government wouldn’t even take into account the fact that he wasn’t a real war criminal and in fact saved many prisoners from death and helped them rather than killed anyone there. His Auschwitz duty itself was like a death sentence. If he disclosed himself, he would undoubtedly be sentenced to death and his wife and son were disgraced as the family of a war criminal. He was one of the very few Germans in Auschwitz who kept his humanity working in that death factory, but his only award was a chance for living in hiding. Becoming invisible he would have a chance to make old bones surrounded by his closest family, his beloved wife and children. And he did so. Later for many years he worked as a tourist guide, happy he could use his mother tongue and communicate with German tourists visiting Poland. He died in 1984 still known as Bronisław Żołnierowicz. Even now we can read that false name on his grave, inscription on the grave label which remains there till day now.

The grave of Edward Lubusch vel Bronisław Żołnierowicz, Jelenia Góra, Poland, 2018.

Historians from Auschwitz were convinced that the SS-man Lubusch had died in Berlin until they met his granddaughter, Joanna Dołęga-Semczuk. She came to the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau to see the exhibitions and saw her grandparents’ wedding photo, exactly the same that stood on the piano in her family home. She remembered her grandfather as an affectionate man, who read the bedtime stories to her and took her for sledding in the winter.

There is no foreign occupation in Poland anymore, that’s why we can finally reveal the real name of Bronisław Żołnierowicz. His granddaughter, Joanna Dołęga-Semczuk, removed the cover of the false name and told loudly: “I am incredibly proud of my grandfather, Edward Lubusch ''. And we can add: an SS-man who deserted Auschwitz and who passed the exam of humanity in totally atrocious times. May God grant him eternal rest.

Bibliography:

• Katarzyna Okoniewska, Doktor Mengele - Anioł Śmierci z Auschwitz. -check-
• Robert Jay Lifton: What made this man? Mengele. Lexis-Nexis® Academic, The New York Times, 1985-07-21. -check-
• Rzeczpospolita, 23.01.2009 r., str. A13, [dostęp 27.09.2020]
• Auschwitz: Doskonałe miejsce do życia, Newsweek, 24.02.2018, [dostęp 27.09.2020] -check-
• Paweł Wodniak, Kolega szkolny esesmana z KL Auschwitz, Auschwitz Muzeum -check-
• Anna Szafrańska, Marek Szafrański (PAP) SS-man z KL Auschwitz, który zdał egzamin z człowieczeństwa, dzieje.pl, [dostęp 27.09.2020] -check-
• Agnieszka Jankowiak-Maik, Najtragiczniejsza historia miłosna z Auschwitz, ciekawostkihistoryczne.pl, [dostęp 27.09.2020] -check-
• Dobry esesman z Auschwitz. Edward Lubuch pozostał człowiekiem w nieludzkich czasach. Twojahistoria.pl, [dostęp 27.09.2020] -check-
• Bogdan Piętka, Spory wokół liczb ofiar Auschwitz, Spory o hisotrię i współczesność, [dostęp 27.09.2020] -check-
• Wiesław Kielar, Anus Mundi, s. 372, Atut, Wrocław 2004. -check-

Written by: Cecylia Buczko

Cecylia Buczko