An Auschwitz love story

“Whosoever saves a single life saves an entire universe —Mishna, Sanhedrin 4:5
By Joe Spier

CALGARY, Alberta, Canada — When Soviet troops entered the Auschwitz extermination camp on January 27, 1945, they found 7,000 survivors from the more than one million who had passed under its gates. Auschwitz has become a symbol for the Holocaust and for evil as such.  Yet, in that world of total moral collapse, there were a few remarkable acts of extraordinary courage and humanity by a small number of the non-Jewish camp inmates. This is the story of one.

Jerzy Bielecki was born on March 28, 1921 in the Kielce region of Poland, the son of devout Catholic parents. He was 19 when he and five friends, intending to fight with the Polish armed forces in France, attempted to escape Nazi occupied Poland by illegally crossing the border into Hungary. They were caught and in June 1940 shipped to Auschwitz with the first transport of 728 Poles. Inmate number 243 was tattooed on Jerzy’s left forearm. It would be another two years before the first transport of Jews would begin arriving at the camp. Most were taken directly to the gas chambers but a few of the stronger would postpone death by being designated for forced labour in horrific conditions.

Jerzy would survive 4years and 5 months in the camp. Amongst the work he performed was building fences, disassembling barracks, building roads and repairing farm machinery. In the fall of 1943, he was working in a grain storehouse when a door opened and a group of girls walked in. One a swarthy, pretty brunette caught the eye of Jerzy.

Cyla Cybulska was 21 years old when on January 21, 1943 she, her parents, a younger sister and two brothers were rounded up in the Jewish ghetto of Lomza in northern Poland and thrown into a cattle car with other Jews from the ghetto. When the train arrived at Auschwitz, the SS cursing and using batons drove the people out of the cars and the selection began. Left meant immediate death. Right was temporarily life. Her parents and 10-year-old sister were directed to the left and killed in the gas chambers. Cyla and her brothers were ordered to the right into forced labour. By September, Cyla with the number 29558 tattooed on her arm, was the only one left. She was repairing grain sacks when Jerzy noticed her.

Jerzy and Cyla struck up a conversation. Over time, their friendship grew stronger. Working in the storehouse offered them brief opportunities to get together. They told each other their life stories. They spoke of their homes, families, friends and childhood. Every meeting was a central event, a grasp at reality in the hell on earth that was the camp, a touch, a caress, a stroking of hair, a brief kiss on the cheek. They became dear and close.  Jerzy and Cyla were deeply in love, fantasizing of marriage and living together forever.

Meanwhile the frenzy of carnage raged in the camp. The chimneys smoked daily. The crematoria did not keep pace with the burning of corpses. Cadaverous odour hovered over the ground. Death was all-pervasive.

Jerzy knew that the only chance Cyla had to avoid the gas chambers was escape and he was prepared to risk everything to save his lover. They first spoke of escape on Christmas Eve 1943. Jerzy devised a plan, audacious yet simple. A fellow inmate who worked in the camp’s laundry storeroom would steal an SS uniform and a pass which was left in a shirt to be cleaned. Jerzy dressed as an SS officer would merely march out of Auschwitz with his prisoner, Cyla.

Originally, the plan included two other prisoners, but convinced that it stood no chance of success, they changed their minds. Even Cyla was frightened and uncertain until her friend Sonia took Cyla in her arms and exclaimed, “Maybe you’re living in freedom just a week or two. Perhaps you are caught, it is hard. But tell the world what is happening here. Let people know. Let the whole world know what they are doing to people here.”

There was a problem with the pass. It was in the name of Storm Trooper Helmuth Stehler, who was well known to the guards. Jerzy, with eraser and pencil changed the name to Steiner. In addition, the pass was green. The camp commandant was in the habit of changing the colour of the passes from time to time and Jerzy would have to wait until the colour green came up again.

On July 21, 1944, the time was right. Jerzy in the dress and guise of SS officer Helmuth Steiner appeared at the laundry barrack where Cyla had been moved for work duty and demanded of the overseer in fluent German that she be released into his custody for police interrogation. With every agonizing step down the long path that led to the camp’s side gate, Jerzy’s heart pounded and his hands trembled. Cyla was pale with terror. They were certain that they would be shot. Approaching the gate’s sentry post, Jerzy shouted “Heil Hitler” as he presented the forged pass to the guard who eyed the document and responded, “weiter machen” (“you can go”). Jerzy clicked his heels and led Cyla out of Auschwitz into freedom but not safety.

Hiding and resting during the day, they walked through fields and woods under the darkness of night towards a village near Krakow where Jerzy’s uncle lived. They crossed rivers. When the water was high, Jerzy carried Cyla. At one point, too exhausted to continue, Cyla begged Jerzy to leave her. He refused. Finally, after nine nights of wandering they arrived.

Word had spread throughout the area that a pair of prisoners had escaped Auschwitz. It was still very dangerous for them and it was decided by Jerzy’s relatives that for the safety of the two, they must split up for the duration of the war. The couple spent their last night together under a pear tree in an orchard saying their goodbyes and vowing to meet right after the war. Cyla was hidden in a nearby farm. Jerzy was placed with a friend in Krakow and soon joined a guerrilla unit of Poland’s Home Army.

After the Soviet army liberated Krakow in January 1945, Jerzy walked the 40 kilometres to the farmhouse in which Cyla was secreted. He was 4 days too late. Cyla had left. The area of the farmhouse was liberated some 3 weeks earlier. Each day Cyla would disappear for hours and watch the road. Jerzy did not come. Cyla was led to believe that Jerzy was killed in a raid against the Partisans. Likewise, Jerzy was told that Cyla had gone to Sweden and had died in a hospital in Stockholm. Jerzy’s family, Catholics did not want him to marry a Jewish girl. Both Cyla and Jerzy had been lied to. Each of the lovers believed that the other was dead.

Cyla got on a train to Warsaw. Aboard she met a Jewish man, David Zacharowicz and the two began a relationship that ended in marriage. They moved to Sweden and then to New York where they started a jewellery business. Zacharowicz died in 1975.

Jerzy remained in Poland.  In 1947, he married and started a family of his own. He worked as director of a school for car mechanics.

Here our tale of love found in the most evil of places and then lost by cruel circumstances would have ended except for the intervention of fate.

While talking to her Polish cleaning lady in 1983, Cyla began relating her Auschwitz escape story. As Cyla was telling her account in detail, her cleaning lady interrupted her; “I know the story. I saw a man on Polish TV saying that he had led his Jewish girlfriend out of Auschwitz.” Cyla, astounded, managed to track down Jerzy’s telephone number and one morning in May 1983, the phone rang in his apartment. “I heard someone crying or laughing on the phone,” related Jerzy and then a female voice said, “This is me, your little Cyla.”

On June 7, 1983, Cyla landed at the airport in Krakow, there met by Jerzy with 39 red roses in hand, one for each year they spent apart. Cyla returned to Poland many times. Jerzy also visited her in New York. They jointly visited Auschwitz. Love was being rekindled. Cyla attempted to convince Jerzy to leave his wife and come to her in America. He could not. Finally, she wrote, “Jerzy, I will not come again.” She did not nor did she ever again reply to any of his letters.

Cyla passed away in February 2005. In 2006 Cyla’s daughter Fay Roseman, an assistant professor, met the man who saved the life of her mother when Fay led a group of Florida teenagers to Poland on the “March of the Living”.

For saving the life of Cyla Cybulska, Israel’s Yad Vashem in 1985 honoured Jerzy Bielecki, by appointing him one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” the designation reserved for non-Jews who during the Holocaust, in contrast to the mainstream of indifference and hostility that prevailed, by acts of selflessness and courage, at risk to their own lives, were the small minority that saved Jewish lives. The medal presented to Jerzy, like the medal awarded to each of the “Righteous” is inscribed with the Jewish saying, “Whosever saves a single life saves an entire universe.”

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Spier is a retired lawyer with a keen interest in Jewish history.  You may contact him via joe.spier@sdjewishworld.com, or post your comment on this website provided that the rules below are observed.

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