Fish Of Paradise Store

Front Cover

Back Cover

Spine

Synopsis

Born in 1920, as a teenage Officer Cadet Eugeniusz Tytyk becomes a Catering Officer on the front line during the September 1939 campaign when the WWII starts. He becomes a POW but soon is able to escape from the German captivity. Returns home and immediately starts with a small group of closest friends their clandestine preparations to fight the Nazi invaders. With two of his best friends he attempts to get to France were Polish Legions are being formed, but they get caught at the Austrian-Hungarian border. Placed in a prison in Vienna on April 1, 1940, they stay there until May 1941 when a special tribunal sentences them to three years in prison for fighting the German state. This term is to be served after the war, but first they are sent to the Moorlager - a concentration camp in Neusustrum, on the German-Dutch border. Eugeniusz gets sick there as the result of terrible working and climate conditions and is sent back to the Vienna prison. After that he is moved between various Nazi prisons, spending most of the time in Stein an der Donau where he works at the Gustloff Werke ammunition factory. In January 1944 he is sent to the deadliest Nazi concentration camp - Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he gets tattooed with "171515" prisoner number. He spends there eleven months, suffering hunger, sicknesses, cold, hard work and comes closed to death many times, including three infamous selections conducted by Dr. Mengele. Miraculously, he survives Auschwitz and in December of 1944 he is sent to the Buchenwald camp and its satellite - the Ohrdruf camp. Then he participates in one of the death marches, exposed to cold and hunger, from Buchenwald to Leitmeritz in Czech Sudeten. Leitmeritz is his last concentration camp. He works in an underground tank factory Richard I and like all of the fellow prisoners has to suffer the Nazi terror, cold and hunger so severe that they are forced to eat grass and lignite coal. The war ends on May 8, 1945 and Eugeniusz is finally free, but he has a number of dangerous encounters with the winners of the war - the Russian soldiers. Luckily, he survives that too and returns home on May 21, 1945.