Kazimir was captured by the Nazis and sent to the Auschwitz Death Camp. The Nazis saw that Kazimir was small, so they made Kazimir build the roof on the crematoria.
So Kazimir hid in the cracks of the roof, and then crawled up the 90 foot chimney. Kazimir waited until the Nazis left, and then he jumped. He was so dehydrated that he just bounced when he hit the ground.
Then Kazimir ran away!
He could hear his bones rattling when he ran.
Kazimir Ladny, left,
thought his childhood friend Kazimir Tafilin, right, had
been killed at Birkenau,
while Tafilin thought Ladny had been killed on the Russian front.
while Tafilin thought Ladny had been killed on the Russian front.
Bakke: Friends each thought other died in WWII
By Dave Bakke (dave.bakke@sj-r.com)
THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER
Posted Aug 11, 2009
When he was a boy, Kazimir Tafilin was so short he had trouble riding a bicycle. That is what Kazimir Ladny remembers best about the friend he had as a child growing up in Kakolewnica, Poland, nearly a century ago.
But Ladny, who lives in Springfield, remembers something else about his small friend. He remembers hearing that Tafilin and his family had died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland during World War II.
Ladny was a counterintelligence officer in the Polish army until being captured by the Russian army after it invaded Poland in 1939. He spent time in POW camps in both Russia (Siberia) and, after a prisoner swap between the two countries, in Germany.
Ladny, who is 95 years old, still travels to Poland each year to visit family. Seven years ago, as the family was reminiscing, someone happened to mention that Kazimir Tafilin was alive. Once the shock wore off, Ladny went to find his boyhood friend.
“That is a story in itself,” says Ladny. “There was this old man pulling weeds in his garden. I said hello, but he didn’t recognize me. I said, ‘It’s Kazimir Ladny,’ and he jumped back, ‘What! Are you still alive!!??’
“I said, ‘I can ask you the same question: Are you still alive? But I see that you are.’”
While Ladny spent about 60 years thinking that Tafilin had been killed in Birkenau (sometimes called Auschwitz II), Tafilin always assumed that because Ladny never came home, he had been killed on the Russian front.
In a picture of them together, taken earlier this year, the 5-foot, 7-inch Ladny towers over his old friend.
In getting reacquainted, Ladny told Tafilin how he survived. While working on a prison farm in Germany, Ladny escaped. It was his third try. A German woman hid him and fed him, at the risk of her own life. The two eventually married. In 1951, they left Poland for America and settled in Springfield.
Tafilin’s story might be even more amazing. Nazi commanders at Auschwitz ordered him to build a roof on one of the crematoriums used to dispose of prisoners’ bodies. They chose him for the job because, as small as Tafilin was, he could maneuver in tight spaces under the roof as he built it.
As a result, Tafilin knew every inch of space under that roof — knowledge that saved his life. He escaped the camp by climbing up the inside of the crematorium’s chimney and out the top.
“He peeked over the top of the chimney,” Ladny says, “and saw soldiers so he slid back down. He kept peeking until the coast was clear, then he jumped down.
“He said he was so dehydrated that he just bounced when he hit the ground. He said he could hear his bones rattling when he ran.”
In a corner of the yard at his home in Poland, Tafilin has built a shrine in honor of those, including his own family, who did not survive the Holocaust. The walk-in shrine is dedicated to the Rev. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest.
Kolbe was imprisoned in Auschwitz when another prisoner, Franciszek Gajowniczek, was among those selected to die by starvation. Upon hearing that Gajowniczek was worried about his family, Kolbe volunteered to die in his place, which he did. Kolbe was canonized as a saint in the Catholic Church by Pope John Paul II in 1982. Gajowniczek was at the Vatican for that ceremony.
Knowing that Ladny would be coming back to Poland again this year, Tafilin arranged for something special — a Mass of thanksgiving in St. Philip Neri Church in their hometown of Kakolewnica. On May 24, the two reunited for the Mass.
Tafilin, who is 90, walked into the church wearing a Polish army uniform, though interestingly enough, he never served in that army. Ladny explains that sometime after the war, in honor of his heroism, the Polish government made Tafilin a captain in the army so that he could receive the increased government benefits that come with being an army officer.
Ladny, who chronicled his life in 2001 in a book titled “It Was Worth It,” still gets emotional when he tells the story of himself and Tafilin, his friend who saved himself by crawling up the inside of a crematorium chimney.
Had Tafilin been a bigger man, he never would have made it. Perhaps that is why he never grew.
Everybody has a story. The problem is that some of them are boring. If yours is not, contact Dave Bakke at 788-1541 or dave.bakke@sj-r.com. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. To read more, visit www.sj-r.com/bakke.
Article: "Bakke: Friends each thought other died in WWII"
