Karol Tendera survived hell in the German concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. The German Nazis conducted experiments on him. Years later, he struggled against the false term “Polish death camps”. He even sued German television.

It was spring 1940. Poland was then under German and Soviet occupation.  A young Pole, Karol Tendera, together with other students from a vocational school in Kraków, was sent by the Germans to Hanover as forced labour. He was employed there in the construction of aircraft. Karol managed to escape, but the Germans caught him and sent him to another place of forced labour. From there he also escaped and returned to his home city of Krakow.

To hell in Auschwitz

Unfortunately, in 1943 he was caught by the German secret police, the Gestapo, who interrogated him brutally during the investigation.  After, he was sent to another hell – the German concentration camp of Auschwitz. There the Germans carried out pseudo-medical experiments on him, but he did not break down and joined the camp resistance movement formed by Polish prisoners. Among other things, he was responsible for preparing parcels for those who were preparing to escape from the camp.

The end of the war was met by Tendera in another camp – in Litomierzyce (now the Czech Republic). He was threatened with the death penalty for an earlier escape attempt. In the end, he avoided the terrible fate.

After the war, Karol Tendera was intensively involved in spreading the truth about what happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Among other things, he published the book “Poles and Jews in Auschwitz 1940-1945” and cooperated with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Victims Memorial Foundation and the Centre for Dialogue and Prayer in Oświęcim.

German, not Polish, death camps

In 2013, he brought a lawsuit against ZDF (German public television), which had committed a lie by using the phrase “Polish death camps”. The Court of Appeal in Krakow in 2016 agreed with the Pole. It found that this term was false and violated Tendera’s individual rights.

Although the Germans established some of the camps on Polish-occupied land, they cannot be described as ‘Polish’ because the sites were established and run by the Germans. Their responsibility for the crimes that took place there is indisputable.

Karol Tendera died on 1 October 2019.