Jane Allwright

June 20, 1942. A car pulls up to the main gate of Auschwitz. Inside are four men in SS uniforms. The guard doesn't raise the barrier fast enough, so the officer in the passenger seat leans out and screams at him in German to open the damn gate. The guard snaps to attention and lets them through. None of them were SS. All four were prisoners. And they had just stolen the car right out of the camp. The man who yelled at the guard was Kazimierz Piechowski, prisoner number 918. He had been in Auschwitz for two years, since the camp's very first months, when it held mostly Polish political prisoners. He was 22. His friend Eugeniusz Bendera, a mechanic working in the camp garage, came to him with news. His name was on a list to be executed. He wanted out. He knew where the SS kept their cars. And he could drive. Piechowski knew something too. Because of his work assignment, he knew there was a storeroom full of SS uniforms and weapons. So they planned the impossible. They recruited two more men, a Polish army officer named Stanisław Jaster and a priest named Józef Lempart. On a quiet Saturday, when fewer guards were around, the four of them pushed a cart full of trash out through the camp gate. The one with the words Arbeit Macht Frei over it. To the guards, they looked like just another work detail. Once outside the inner fence, they slipped into the building with the storeroom. Piechowski climbed in through a coal chute, unlocked the door, and they grabbed SS uniforms, pistols, and grenades. Bendera went to the garage and took one of the best cars on site, a Steyr reportedly used by the camp commandant himself, Rudolf Höss. Then they drove calmly through the camp toward the exit. As they got closer to the final gate, the barrier stayed down. Nobody moved. Seconds felt like hours. The men in the back were sure they'd been caught. Then Piechowski leaned out the window and shouted at the guard like an angry SS officer. The barrier went up. They drove away and ditched the car later. All four escaped. The Germans were humiliated. Some of the escapees' families paid a terrible price. Jaster's parents were sent to Auschwitz and died there. But here's the twist. Stanisław Jaster wasn't just escaping. He was carrying something out. A report from inside the camp, written by Witold Pilecki, the man who volunteered to go into Auschwitz to expose it. Piechowski joined the Polish resistance and kept fighting. When the war ended, communist Poland arrested him for having served in the Home Army and sent him to prison for years. He lived to 98 and spent his later years telling his story. A prisoner who spent two years in Auschwitz walked out through the front gate yelling at the guards. In the commandant's car.