As the horrors of Auschwitz unfolded around them, two 20-somethings found love, lost one another then reunited decades later – leading to one of the most remarkable escapes of WWII
Jerzy Bielecki, a Polish Catholic, and Cyla Cybulska, a Jew from eastern Poland whose entire family was murdered by the Nazis, worked together in the camp’s grain silo.
“Amidst the horrors of the death camp, men and women were actually forbidden to speak to one another,” says historian Dr Kate Vigurs. “But there were instances where they would come together on work details or brush up against one another within prison life.
“As in the case of Jerzy and Cyla, they met one another on a work detail. She caught his eye and the two instantly fell in love.”
When Cyla witnessed an SS guard shoot her best friend dead, Jerzy knew they had to escape in order to survive.
Slowly, he gathered all the pieces of a German guard’s uniform and a security pass, determined to smuggle Cyla out too.
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Then in May 1944, with the plan ready, Cyla stopped arriving for work. Jerzy was petrified she’d been taken to the punishment block – or executed. But after several desperate weeks, a noted smuggled from Cyla confirmed she was alive and had been transferred to the camp laundry.
Jerzy quickly put his plan in motion. On July 20 1944, he passed a note back to Cyla, telling her to be ready for a guard to take her for interrogation. The next day, a ‘guard’ arrived at the laundry. To Cyla’s astonishment, it was Jerzy dressed in the stolen German uniform.
“They managed to walk through the camp, out the main entrance and out onto the road, essentially to freedom,” says Dr Vigurs. “And they just kept walking.”
They walked for nine days through Nazi-occupied Poland, outwitting the death squads sent to find them, until they reached the home of one of Jerzy’s uncles. There, they parted, advised that they were in greater danger of being caught if they stayed together.
Jerzy hid with the Polish resistance, and Cyla was taken in by a local family, with the young sweethearts vowing to reunite when war was over.
But each later believed the other had died. Cyla moved to America, eventually marrying and having a daughter. Jerzy stayed in Poland also marrying and having a family.
Then in 1982, Cyla, then a widow, told a friend of her incredible escape. The friend recalled a Polish man named Jerzy on TV recounting his own remarkable escape. He was alive and working as a school principal in Poland.
The pair reunited in 1983, when Cyla flew back to Poland to find the man who had rescued her 39 years earlier, visiting places linked to their escape.
Their remarkable story did not end with a romantic reunion, with Jerzy devoted to his wife and children, its huge significance remains.
“This couple have become known as the lovers of Auschwitz,” says Dr Vigurs. “If it hadn’t been for their love for one another inside the camp, perhaps they would never have escaped. They might not even have survived. So their love made sure that they got out of the camp, and that they lived a very full and long life.”
Hidden death camp
Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in a remote part of eastern Poland, is less known than others like Auschwitz – because almost no-one who went there survived to recount the atrocities that took place.
“This camp existed solely for the extermination of Jewish people,” says historian Mat McLachlan. “They were sent there on trains, and fairly swiftly killed thereafter.”
Of the thousands sent to Sobibor, just 50 or so survived. Among them was Alexander Pechersky, a Ukrainian Jew who fought for the Red Army before his capture in 1941.
After harrowing experiences in other camps, Pechersky was transferred to Sobibor along with 100 other Soviet Jewish POWs in September 1943. Forced into labour at the camp, fear loomed large that if he grew too weak to carry on, he faced certain death.
Desperate to survive he masterminded a mass escape. Within weeks of his arrival at Sobibor, his plot sprang into action, on October 14 1943.
Prisoners lured a senior Nazi to the camp’s tailor shop with a pretence of fitting him for a suit. Moments later, he was axed to death in the prison workshop. Over the coming hours, 10 more guards were quietly killed and their uniforms stolen, as Pechersky planned to lead an attack on the SS soldiers guarding the main gate.
When a German soldier started shooting elsewhere in the camp, the prisoners were shocked into action and their fightback began ahead of schedule.
“The uprising was incredibly violent,” says Mat McLachlan. “The prisoners took the opportunity to overwhelm the guards, and most of the guards were killed with axes. It would have been an absolutely horrific environment.
“Once the uprising had been discovered, the guards opened fire and prisoners were fleeing in all directions, people getting shot on the wire, more guards were being killed. It was just absolutely overwhelming violence in the camp.”
But 300 men, women and children escaped, chased by guards with guns and dogs. Within days, 100 had been found and executed, with others starving and wandering in the forest.
A small number – including Pechersky – evaded capture and survived the war. The Ukrainian hero was sent back to the front before being wounded in battle and invalided out of the Red Army in 1944. He died in 1990.
Dr Kate Vigurs says: “The legacy of the Sobibor uprising is incredibly important… It shows that the Jews did resist, that there was fighting back against the Holocaust and against the prison system. They didn’t just willingly go to their deaths, as has so often been said. It showed a real determination for survival.”
The brutalities of Auschwitz
More than a million people were slaughtered in Auschwitz, 90% of them Jews.
That tally may have been even higher without the astonishing actions of two men who managed to escape and reveal to the world the true horrors Hitler and his henchmen had unleashed there.
Rudolph Vrba, born Walter Rosenburg, was 17 when he arrived at the camp in June 1942. Within days he witnessed the hanging of two prisoners who had tried to escape.
But the guards’ brutality made him more determined to escape. For 10 nightmarish months, the young Slovakian was forced to clear wagons of bodies at the railway station, rifling through the personal possessions of the dead.
Malnourished and traumatised, even battling typhus, Vrba made a mental record of what he saw – the number of train arrivals, wagons and prisoners.
In early 1944, Vrba and fellow inmate Alfred Wetzler, a friend from his hometown, learned the Nazis were preparing for the arrival of Hungary’s entire Jewish population – meaning certain death for thousands of men, women and children.
So they hatched a plan to escape, determined to expose the atrocities of Auschwitz to the world.
On April 7, 1944, the men climbed into a space inside a woodpile. Hidden, they pushed oil-soaked tobacco into the gaps to deter the sniffer dogs hunting them with the German guards.
For three days they lay in silence in the dark and cold, without food or drink.
Historian Mat McLachlan says: “At one stage, they could hear a couple of German guards nearby conducting the search, musing as to whether the woodpile would be a good hiding place. The German guards actually began removing wood from the pile. But fortunately there was a commotion elsewhere in the camp and the guards ran off.”
Incredibly, by disturbing so much of the wood, the guards had made it easier for Vrba and Wetzler to push their way free.
Soon, under the cover of darkness, they crawled to a nearby forest – where they began their treacherous 130km journey through Nazi-occupied Poland towards the Slovakian border.
Mat McLachlan says: “The penalty for assisting Jews and escaped prisoners in Poland was death. Yet, a local lady took them in and provided them with shelter and clothing.”
But the danger kept on coming. Travelling onward, the pair were spotted by a Nazi patrol, shot at and chased by tracker dogs – escaping by plunging into a river. Finally, 14 days after evading their captors, they made it to the safety of Slovakia on April 21.
There they wrote the earthshattering Vrba-Weltzer Report containing horrifying details about the true nature of Auschwitz, its gas chambers and crematoria.
Mat McLachlan says: “Finally, the rest of the world understood the depth of the horror in the German camps.”
On July 6 1944, 90 days after the daring escape, Hungarian Regent Miklos Horthy abandoned plans to send more Jews to Auschwitz.
Dr Vigurs says: “Most of the Jews in the Hungarian suburbs had already been deported straight into Birkenau and murdered straight away, but there were still 200,000 Jews within Budapest, and this report stopped their deportation.”
The Vrba-Wetzler Report would later be used as evidence at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunals of 1946.
VE Day 80 on Sky HISTORY marks 80 years since the end of World War 2 with a selection of curated documentaries throughout April and May
Greatest Escapes of WWII will premiere on Tuesday 29th April at 9pm