Czesław Aredzki
1943, Końskie, Poland
Czesław is standing in the street smoking a cigarette. This is where he usually spends his breaks, peoplewatching. This day nothing will be as usual. Without warning, Czesław is arrested by the Gestapo. Czesław does not understand why he has been arrested, and no one tells him.
CZESŁAW AREDZKI WAS FROM a non-Jewish, middle-class Polish family. In 1939 he was 24 years old and had spent a year at cadet school. He was a student at the Warsaw School of Economics and was engaged to a girl named Krystyna.
When Germany attacked Poland, Czesław was sent to the front as a non-commissioned officer in the Polish army. He fled from the Nazi German army and became a Soviet prisoner of war.
He tore off his rank insignia and was therefore treated as an enlisted soldier instead of an officer. Czesław was released and walked all the way back to Poland, where he reunited with his fiancée.
They married in Krystyna’s hometown of Końskie in February 1941, and Czesław got a job as a clerk at a farmers’ co-operative. In August 1943, Czesław was arrested by the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secretpolice, and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.