Tadeusz Sobolewicz
born March 26, 1925
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Tadeusz Sobolewicz, 1950 (private collection)
Escape from the Fire of Mülsen
Tadeusz Sobolewicz attended high school in Poznan´. After the war began, he took part in the resistance as a messenger. The sixteenyear-old was arrested on September 1, 1941.
Sobolewicz arrived at Mülsen St. Micheln via the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Soviet prisoners in this Flossenbürg subcamp revolted in late April 1944 due to their meager food rations. A fire broke out during the revolt. Sobolewicz suffered severe burns and was brought to the Flossenbürg sick bay to die. However, a Polish prisoner secretly cared for the seriously injured prisoner, and Sobolewicz survived. On March 19, 1945, the SS transferred him to the Regensburg subcamp to work clearing bomb rubble from the train station. While on the death march, Sobolewicz escaped and hid in a barn near the village of Laufen until the Americans arrived.
Tadeusz Sobolewicz (in front, second from left) with other liberated prisoners in Laufen, May/June 1945 (private collection)
Sobolewicz’s father died at Auschwitz. In 1946, Tadeusz returned to Poland after receiving word that his mother had survived five years’ imprisonment in a concentration camp. He became an actor. Through the theater, he found his way back to a normal life: “I feel free here.” In his autobiography, he remembers his experiences as a concentration camp inmate.
Original edition of Tadeusz Sobolewicz’s autobiography, Wytrzymałem więc jestem (I Endured, Therefore I Am), Katowice 1986 (Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial)
The title of the 1993 first German edition was “Aus dem Jenseits zurück” (Back from the Beyond).