'14 Chtheroe Advertiser & runes, May 4th, lit'Jo T he Nation gives T hanks


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The German war machine had been engaged in Poland for only a few weeks, but it was operating with a ruthless efficiency and there was already a shortage of food there.


vered his bicycle along the country tracks city.


par ree


! youngi cel of 1


After being caught by Hitler’s SS, the Polish teenager was detained at Gestapo headquarters in Poznan before being incarcerated in the con­ centration camps at Poznan, then Dachau and finally Gusen-Matthau- sen in Austria, where he arrived in April, 1940.


Five years and seven months later, after living through the inhumanity of three concentration camps, Mr Bialecki was able to pick up the pieces of his shattered life and begin the journey which led to a new start in Clitheroe.


The 36-hour journey from Poznan, in


North West Poland, to Dachau, in southern Bavaria, was spent in the


primitive wagons of a train which was not even fit for animals. Crammed into trucks, which had the barest of slits for ventilation, over 3,000 prisoners were transported like cattle on their way to slaughter.


When Mr Bialecki arrived at Gusen, he had already endured six months of brutality at the hands of the Nazis and yet he was not to know that that was just the prelude to the barba­ rism which we know, in hindsight, was a disgrace to humanity itself.


Fifty two thousand people — East Europeans, Jews, German and Ital­ ian political prisoners — died in Gusen concentration camp during the war years. From a total of 3,000 Poles, Mr Bialecki was just one of only four who survived the death camp and walked out alive in 1945.


Death was a daily occurrence, as was brutality. Survival manifested itself in searching and scraping for any­ thing that resembled food in the starved camp.


Pigs received better nourishment than Gusen prisoners, who would eat any­ thing to stay alive.


At the morning roll-call, Mr Bialecki and his comrades would often hold up the arms of dead friends so that they could procure an extra ladle of filthy soup and an extra slice of bread. The inmates would do almost anything to survive.


Mr Bialecki was one of the first inmates at Gusen concentration


camp. He was forced to build the barracks and the stone yard, where the SS swaggered and the pathetic mass of broken humanity collected for daily roll-call. •


During the first weeks of his. captiv­ ity, the diminutive young man (he


stands just 5ft. 4in. tall) watched the German stonemasons craft out the stones, after he and his comrades had


Prisoners got food in three ways. In the evening, they were given a tiny slice of bread and a slice of mar­ garine, half of which had to be saved for the morning after if they wanted to sustain themselves for the next day’s hard labour. Tea was brewed from the bark of trees which, also in a ground form, supplemented the flour for making bread. Soup, if it could be called that, was made from any filth that would transform boiled water into a colour other than clear.


Eighteen-year-old Marcin Bialecki was taking food from his mother’s farm to his sister in Poznan and was only 100m from her house when the Gestapo swooped.


food as he m an eu ­ towards


the


TOMO It It O W Marcin Bialccki


carried them on their shoulders from the quarry. His curiosity endeared him to the foreman, who engaged him as an apprentice. The possession of a trade saw Mr Bialecki through five years of hell and proved to be a saviour from the gas chambers and from the psychopathic indulgencies of some of history’s most degenerate individuals.


Mr Bialecki is deaf in one ear. This is down to an incident with one such psychopath. The German in question took a dislike to the way his Polish prisoner was shovelling some earth. He snatched away the heavy spade, dug deep into the earth a number of times and then, inexplicably, swung the iron implement on to the side of the face of the unsuspecting Pole.


Another incident, which resulted in Mr Bialecki losing a tooth, would almost certainly have ended in his death if not for the intervention of the stone­ mason’s foreman.


Once again, it involved a German, who smashed a plate into Mr Bialecki’s


face. On this occasion the young man fought back, but this only led to a heavy beating by low-ranking SS thugs, who then attempted to force the battered man to grab hold of the camp’s electrified penmeter wire.


Mr Bialecki struggled with his tormen­ tors, fighting off the sub-human creatures who were attempting to murder him, and was only saved from a disgusting death when his foreman, a higher-ranking official, stepped out of his office and ordered the brutes off.


The Gestapo were indiscriminate in their brutality. One Sunday after­ noon a roll-call was ordered and the camp’s unfortunate specimens-of h a l f - l i f e s to o d b e fo r e th e ' commandant. .■ . .


He had received orders from Berlin to liquidate 5,000 inmates and, with a shameful disinterest, he personally selected the unfortunate people. They, in gradual realisation of the terrifying truth, screamed and cried in terror, vainly for mercy.


Even as the Gestapo realised that defeat was upon them, they were cunning in their barbarism.


On the Tuesday evening, hours before they deserted the camp on hearing news of the arrival of Allied forces, the Gestapo had Mr Bialecki and eight other men shaved and dressed and told them they were to be freed. Of course, they were to be put on a train and sent to the sister concen­ tration camp of Matthausen just three miles away, but they were to be sinisterly gassed en route.


This never happened, however, for Austrian police arrived in camp, informed th e Gestapo of the approaching Russian troops and Hitler’s secret police fled the camp.


At 3 p.m. on Wednesday, May 5th, one white and two black American soldiers arrived at the camp and the broken remains of the creatures who had inhabited Gusen concentration camp were given their freedom.


Marcin Bialecki, at 23, weighed just five stone when he walked away from Gusen and, with hundreds of his fel­ low liberated prisoners, forced his way through armed American guards, crossed the River Danube and entered the Austrian city of Linz.


All over Europe, subjected peoples were , being liberated by the Allies.


photographers, and newsreels exposed to a dazed world what had previously been a blur on its consciousness. Below is the camp where Marcin Bialecki mira- ■


GUSEN concentration camp was a place of hor­ ror, death and depression. At the end of the war in Europe the Allied forces,


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culously survived until its inmates were released and, above, is the horrific reality of a time, we should never forget.


war ended, Mr Bialccki (right) was a b o u t to begin life in the free world, but he will also never forget his five d a rk y e a r s of camp life.


id e n t i ty c a rd directly after the


He was unable to return to his native Poland because of the Soviet Union’s


Liberation from Nazi tyranny had come, but true freedom was still out of the reach of the young Pole.


man population. Mr Bialecki pre­ ferred to thank God and pray for the ending of the barbaric bloodletting.


Some took their revenge on the Ger­


„ Z A W O L N O S C ” “ F O R F R E E D O M ”


leaving red hot Naples only to arrive in dark, damp Glasgow and then to


occupation of Eastern Europe. For two years his life remained in limbo. Stints in the US army in Austria and the Polish army in Italy were fol­ lowed by the final journey to Britain in September, 1946. He remembers


be shunted to Clitheroe and Low Moor.


The mother he left behind in his native Poland, when the SS abducted him in


As his daughter, Mrs Susan McTear, adisab p"iig belii


advocates livi i ■ nfe to the full and he has a great deal of strength to give.”


ngi


Since that time, Mr Bialecki (74) has experienced tragedy again, losing his wife and one of his sons, Martin, Dut, his strength of character is there for all to see.


Phyllis, in 1949, and the couple had had five of their six children.


Mr Bialecki finally became a civilian in 1947 and, for his pains, received the sum of £5. He took up residence in Clitheroe and has been here ever since, working at the Ribhlesdale cement works for nearly 30 years, for 25 of which he was a shift foreman.


October, 1939, was not seen again until 1962. By that, time Mr Bia­ lecki was well established in Clith-. eroe. He had married his wife,


f ■ !


is ready to cele­ brate 50 years of freedom. Pictured on his


FIFTY years after liberation from a Nazi concentration camp, a Clitheroe man tells his horrifying story and, among all the VE Day celebrations, reminds us that we should never forget


.


Victory in Europe opens gates


of horror camp


Vlitheroe 22S24 (Editorial), 2H3UH (Advertising). Bu rn le y iHEddl (Classified)


:: Pocjpls wlalcldola Icgltymaijh'T.rrSIgnaturo^f IjolderiJ-i >


! * ' I____L i„ . . ___________ ________ *'■' v . * sL p x; j


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