My father became a Political Prisoner when he and two of his friends were trying to get to France to join the Polish Legions there so that they could fight the Germans whose army (Wehrmacht) invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.

They were sentenced to 3 years in prison that they were to serve after the war, but for the time being the Nazis sent them to the Moorlager - a concentration camp on the German-Dutch border in the Emsland region.

It was just one a number of camps and prisons that Eugeniusz Tytyk was imprisoned by the Nazis during WWII. The other concentration camps were: the worst of them - Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he spent 11 months (from January to December 1944), Buchenwald, Ohrdruf and Leitmeritz. Some of the prisons where he was doing his term included: Vienna and Stein An Der Donau.

In each of those places Eugeniusz was very close to death and could be killed or could die many times. He describes those "close encounters with death" in his "Living Shadows" book.

Technorati tags: Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau, political prisoner, WWII, Nazi camps, concentration camps, death camps, Holocaust, Eugeniusz Tytyk