485 Days at Majdanek, Surviving a German Concentration Camp

It was my privilege to translate Jerzy Kwiatkowski’s memoir from Polish to English. Recently published by the Hoover Press, 485 Days at Majdanek is a prime example of the types of historical treasures still being unearthed from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University. Jerzy Kwiatkowski was no stranger to tragedy, even before spending two years in German concentration camps. In August 1920, his youngest brother was killed in battle against the Bolsheviks during the Polish-Soviet War. In 1939 alone he lost his wife to illness in February, his mother to a wound sustained during the bombing of Warsaw in September and his mother-in-law died of a heart attack in November, the three people closest to him were gone. Rather than succumbing to sorrow, he threw himself into his work as the director and part-owner of the “Pioneer” factory, a producer of ammunition-making machines, airplane parts and machine tools. It had been taken over by the Germans once the occupation of Poland began, though the former management was retained. A cell of the Polish Home Army, the largest underground resistance organization in Nazi-occupied Europe, was formed in the factory. A clandestine shooting range was assembled in its basement, weapons were procured, and later, firing mechanisms for the Błyskawica (lightning) submachine guns were surreptitiously produced. In the first weeks of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, the machines were carted off and the factory was set on fire. The city would be left in ruins. Kwiatkowski did not see Warsaw in flames. In February 1943, he had been arrested in his office and charged with conspiratorial activity in the headquarters of the Security Police on Szucha Avenue (the late Richard F. Staar, former associate director of the Hoover Institution, was brutally interrogated there as teenager by the Gestapo, causing permanent hearing loss in one ear). After a month-long stay in the infamous Pawiak Prison, Jerzy was sent to the Konzetrationslager (KL) Lublin, known as Majdanek (My-dan-ek), and became prisoner number 8830. During the three “acts” of his imprisonment he worked as a gardener, a clerk in the camp office and as a manual laborer. Each position gave him a unique perspective on dehumanization and genocide intrinsic to the concentration camp system. Kwiatkowski left the camp with the last group of prisoners in late July 1944, hours before forward units of the Red Army swept into the area. After a month in the KL Auschwitz I camp, he was transferred to KL Sachsenhausen, near Berlin. There he served as a translator in the camp office until April 1945 and was finally liberated by American troops on May 3 during an evacuation march. Kwiatkowski did not try to suppress the memory of the murderous brutality that he had witnessed, quite the opposite. Out of a deep sense of responsibility to the victims and loyalty to the friends he had lost, he promised himself to do everything in his power to bring the criminals to justice. As he shared with an interviewer several decades later, “during my entire stay at Majdanek, I assiduously memorized facts, events in the camp, the names of the murderers, their habits, crimes and orders…” By June of 1945 he had already sent a list of names of the worst camp functionaries and their activities at Majdanek and Sachsenhausen to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in London (the archives of the ministry were deposited at the Hoover Library & Archives after the war in part thanks to the famed underground courier and witness to the Holocaust, Jan Karski, whose papers are also at Hoover). In November he was assigned to the Special Staff of the 1^st Armored Division of General Stanisław Maczek, a Polish division occupying part of Germany along the Dutch border in the British Occupation Zone. Among Kwiatkowski’s tasks were helping displaced persons (the multitudes of forced laborers who had been sent to Germany) and various roles in nascent political and concentration camp prisoner’s associations. Here he would begin his work on his memoir in earnest, based on notes and an outline that he would expand upon, working quickly before facts faded from memory. He used a typewriter loaned to him from Polish scouts, typing on the back of blank forms that he found in the German paper company where he wrote. He sat in the unheated room in his coat and hat, finally finishing his reminiscences shortly before Christmas 1945. The cost of his dedication to the task was frostbitten fingers that he had to rehabilitate with quartz lamp therapy for several months afterwards. Despite the tremendous effort put into the undertaking, it would take another 20 years before the memoir would finally see publication. Kwiatkowski’s attempts to generate interest in his work came to naught, explanations ranging from market realities for Polish memoirs (he had moved to Chicago and then New York after the war) to outright rejections claiming that it wasn’t worth publishing. An early suggestion to translate the book into English came to nothing as Kwiatkowski couldn’t afford it. Finally in 1961, thanks to a meeting with a fellow former prisoner, Kwiatkowski learned of the publication program of the State Museum at Majdanek. After sending his manuscript there, he received a reply that affirmed interest in publishing the memoir. Heartened by the news, Kwiatkowski noted in a letter that he wasn’t looking for literary laurels, and he was willing to put his prisoner number in lieu of his name as the author, and that he just wanted to preserve what he had witnessed for history. Kwiatkowski’s enthusiasm was tempered though by a lengthy and invasive editorial process dictated by the ideological dictates of Poland’s communist censors. The book was finally published in December 1966. Widely praised after its release as a powerful and comprehensive testament to the horrors of the camp, the book was a success in Poland and among the Polish diaspora. Although Kwiatkowski wouldn’t live to see the translation of his memoir into English before he passed away in New Jersey in 1980, the Polish edition (republished in 1988) would serve as the ember that eventually brought forth the volume recently published by the Hoover Press. In the early 1970s, Kwiatkowski corresponded with Witold Sworakowski, by then the retired curator for Polish and Eastern European Collections and associate director of the Hoover Institution. The familiar way in which they addressed each other in the two letters that have been found, suggests a friendship that likely stretched back to their early years in Bukovina, then under the control of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Having convinced Jerzy to send his archive to Stanford, by 1976, ten large boxes of Kwiatkowski’s papers had been secured in the Hoover Library & Archives. Finally, in 2018, Dr. Maciej Siekierski (now curator emeritus of the European Collections) was contacted about the collection by Dr. Dorota Niedziałkowska, curator of the Exhibition Department of the State Museum at Majdanek. The museum was interested in publishing a new edition of Kwiatkowski’s memoir and collaborating with Hoover on an English translation. Following extensive research into the Kwiatkowski papers by the staff of the museum, along with scans of numerous photographs and documents provided by Hoover, a new edition of 485 dni na Majdanku was released in Polish later that year. What can be considered the definitive version of Kwiatkowski’s memoir, based on his original 1945 manuscript held at Hoover, and now free of communist-era censorship and heavy-handed editing, was translated and became the recently released English edition. A guiding principle of the translation was to stay true to Kwiatkowski’s raw and honest recollections, written down while the memory of his ordeal was still fresh. Besides necessary editorial refinements, namely the contemporizing of spelling, punctuation and typography, the memoir was left mostly unchanged by the Polish editors. The main additions were footnotes used to clarify terms and references that might not be familiar to the average reader. The English edition includes these footnotes and others to explain lesser-known cultural, historical and linguistic references. The primary difference between the Polish and English editions is the attempt in the latter to pare down the many German words used by Kwiatkowski. Although his knowledge of German was crucial to his insightful understanding of the workings of the camp, for the English reader the profusion of these words was a distraction. Generally, the initial instance of an often-used term appears in the text in German in italics with the definition in a footnote, further instances appear in English. The reader also has access to an extensive glossary of German terms, the nomenclature of the camp. Words and phrases from other languages, like Latin and French, are defined in footnotes. Jerzy Kwiatkowski knew the Majdanek camp inside out, at least as far as a prisoner could. His phenomenal memory and attention to detail have preserved for posterity the inner workings and day to day life of a German concentration camp like no other memoir. In keeping with a long tradition of making priceless historical documentation available to the public, the Hoover Institution has published a fundamental source on the genocidal machine that devastated Europe during the Second World War. The English edition will reach a far broader audience than Kwiatkowski could have ever imagined and it will serve as his poignant legacy to his fellow prisoners who never left Majdanek.