Prologue I am Jozef Szczepaski.

As I sit by the cozy fireplace in my home, finishing the lucid autobiography of Pierre Seel1, a fellow Holocaust survivor, I thought back to my terrible experiences in the Third Reich as a bisexual man in Poland and hence, my story unfolds.

Chapter 1 I lie in my cramped barracks bed2 and watch out the small window at the putrid smoke rising from the crematoria and think about how I got in this hell known as Auschwitz3. I am cold, hungry and miserable. To escape this harsh reality, I think back to my wonderful student days when I was learning electrical engineering in the Warsaw University of Technology I had just got back into my dorm when I heard some speech on the radio. Apparently, the dreaded Paragraph 1754 had been exacerbated by the Nazis to make legal the incarceration of all non-heterosexual people in countries under German rule. How horrible this was. The next day during class I was called to the dean's office. I walked into the office. He muttered, Ive been waiting for the approval to do this for a long time, you dog. As I was an open bisexual, I was being kicked out of the university. I remember it vividly: walking down the marble steps of the university, as I stepped into the sunlight, the large stone buildings casting shadows in the courtyard. As other students walked and laughed, I stood frozen, my heart shattered as I realized all my hard work in getting into the university had been wasted. 1 Pierre Seel was a gay man who was persecuted in the Holocaust ("Pierre Seel"). 2 Between 13,000 and 16,000 concentration camp prisoners were crowded into 28 buildings where they slept in three-tiered bunks ("Birkenau"). 3 Auschwitz, specifically the sub-camp Auschwitz II-Birkenau, was one of the biggest death camps during the holocaust ("Auschwitz Concentration Camp"). 4 Paragraph 175 was a document that illegalized homosexuality but hadn't been enforced in a long time. In fact, Germany is considered very tolerant of homosexuals ("Paragraph 175").

Since being kicked out of the university and declared an outlaw by that radio announcement, I've had to resort to hiding in the attic and having my amiable parents tell law enforcement coming for me that I had not been home. Luckily we have a big attic, so I am still able to do what I normally do without too much discomfort, though our attic is as dusty as the next, with the smell of cheap and weathered wood. One day, I am reading an advanced electronics textbook and I am thinking about the possibilities of complex circuit boards being used to store information when I hear the soldiers walking downstairs. Oh, they're searching for me! I hide behind a box. The ladder to the attic lowers to the ground. The soldiers are in the room. I almost scream as they find me and drag me outside.

I've been in jail for about a week now. I have two black eyes from being beaten by the guards.5 They have placed me by myself in a cell. No one will look at me or talk to me as if I am dirty or something. The door slides open. Its the guards again. I cringe in anticipation of the pain I'm about to get. They do nothing. That's surprising. They bring me outside and put me on a train. Hmm, this is odd. Oh no. It couldn't be. I see people on the train wearing the Star of David. They're sending me to some sort of camp!

Chapter 2 When we get out of the train, we arrive at a camp. It looks like a city, with buildings and barracks scattered before me as far as the eye can see. Men in uniforms march by. There are some men in striped uniforms taking the few clothes I was able to bring in a bag. After passing through them, we are lined up. They take me out of line because I say I am an engineer, per my natural instinct that people who are

5 Homosexuals were often treated harshly and attacked by guards, as in the case of Pierre Seel ("Pierre Seel").

more useful will be treated better. I notice that the original line is made up only of the elderly, young women and children. I shudder. This place seems weird. I look around and notice the stench of the smoke coming from one of the buildings.

Our clothes, garments that do not fit at all, are handed to us when I enter the camp known as Auschwitz. We are given information about what is expected of us. We wake up at 4:30 and work until late at night, when we will eat, and later go to sleep. After that, I and a few other men are called over by a Kapo who says his name is Artur and have a pink triangle affixed to our shirts. We are to work today. I notice that I and the men with the pink triangles6 are given more grueling work than even the Jews.7

After work, we go to sleep in what they call "beds", essentially cabinets with 3 people each in them. I go to sleep. It takes a while because there is noise coughing, snoring and crying. In the "morning", we wake up and I realize that a few sick people are gone. When we get to roll call I see one man get shot for attempting to escape. A man coughs and Artur8 beats him as punishment. I came to the man who was beaten at night and ask him if hes OK. He responds with a quick Yes. Whats your name, I ask. Kacper. And thereafter he becomes the only friend I have in the camp.

Chapter 3 Many die over time. But I have survived. For the past nine years, I've been working on top secret

6 Pink triangles were given to homosexuals to distinguish them from other prisoners ("Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust"). 7 Homosexuals were often given harder work than others ("Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust"). 8 Kapos were convicts deemed better than the others interned in the camps and given roles as low officers ("Auschwitz Concentration Camp")

projects for the Nazis, assisting them in designing various methods of efficient killing and machines that assist the Nazi's goal of world domination. The current project I've been working on is an enhancement of the Z3, a machine called a "Rechner" or computer, invented 3 years ago.9 As a reward, Ive been given solitary confinement. If not for my talent, Id have been killed off long ago due to my natural indolence towards doing work for cruel authority figures. One day, a traumatic thing happens. Artur decides hes had enough of Kacpers attitude towards work and decides to liquidate him. Artur, being the cruel convict he is, makes me watch as he slits his throat and walks away. I dash to see Kacper, but he cannot speak. I decide then that I cannot keep working for the Nazis, and must either escape or die. I see some sonderkommandos running towards the exit of the camp and as they pass me, I hear one hiss to me that they are escaping.10 Seeing the opportunity, I race with them out of the camp. We near the gate, and as the guards are busy, we only have to get through the gate to get out of the camp. A few of us are shot by the gate guards, most others are captured, but a handful of us sneak into the forest. We keep running until we tire and we set up a camp from leaves and wood we chop down with the makeshift knives the sonderkommandos had attacked the guards with. We had escaped.

Epilogue After my escape, I was able to hide in Poland until the war ended. I then moved to America and started a family. This memoir is another attempt by the few of us remaining to make sure that people other than the Jews have their abuses documented. And this is how I end my short memoir of the period of my life from 1935 to 1944 when I stayed in and escaped from Auschwitz. 9 The first machine working with binary arithmetics, the Z3, including programming capacity, was developed in 1941 by the German engineer Konrad Zuse, and became in essence the first digital computer ("Science and Technology in Nazi Germany"). 10That escape later came to be known as the Birkenau Revolt. Birkenau Kommando III attacked officers and ran off, but almost all known escapees were captured and executed ("Auschwitz Concentration Camp").

Works Cited "Auschwitz Concentration Camp." Wikimedia Foundation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp. (Jan. 25 2010) "Carl Vrnet." Wikimedia Foundation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Vaernet. (Jan. 25 2010) "History of Auschwitz." Scrapbook Pages http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/Birkenau01.html. (Jan. 25 2010) "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/hsx/chapter10.php. (Jan. 25 2010) "Paragraph 175." Wikimedia Foundation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph_175. (Jan. 25 2010) "Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust." Wikimedia Foundation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_homosexuals_in_Nazi_Germany_and_the_ Holocaust. (Jan. 25 2010) "Pierre Seel." Wikimedia Foundation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Seel. (Jan. 25 2010) "Science and Technology in Nazi Germany." 11 Mar. 2008. Lite Strabo. http://litestraboen.blogspot.com/2008/03/science-and-technology-in-nazigermany.html. (Jan. 25 2010)