In Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kapos were privileged prisoners given the power of life and death over the inmates under their control. Armed with a truncheon provided by their Nazi overlords, some were known to beat inmates to death for no particular reason at all.

Felix Opatowski , LEFT, had that in mind when he approached Kapo “Ziggy” to ask for reassignment to less rigorous work. He knew he was taking his life in his hands, but Kapo “Ziggy” – Opatowski doesn’t know his last name – was not one of the brutal supervisors. In fact, Ziggy was quite helpful, directing Opatowski to another kapo who recruited him to the job he held for most of his two years in Birkenau, cleaning and maintaining the electric wires that surrounded the camp.

Opatowski, 84, recalled that first encounter with Ziggy last week when he read The CJN’s coverage of the Canadian government’s program to commemorate the St. Louis, a passenger ship crammed with more than 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. In 1939 the liner was turned away by Canada, the United States, Cuba and a number of Latin American countries.

Denied refuge in the months preceding the war, the ship returned to Europe where its passengers disembarked. About one-third are believed to have been killed. One of them was Ziggy, who Opatowski saw shot only feet away from him by a high-ranking Nazi officer after inmates sabotaged the gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau on Oct. 7, 1944.

Opatowski is writing a book about his experiences and a movie is in the works, but last week he recounted his and Ziggy’s role in the sabotage operation.

A native of Lodz, Opatowski was not yet 17 when he was arrested for smuggling food into the city’s Jewish ghetto. Torn from his family, he was sent to Poznan for hard labour. “I was heartbroken to leave my mother, my father and my brother,” he said. “That was the last I saw of them.”

In the spring of 1943, after two years in Poznan, he was shipped to Auschwitz, where he would remain until the camp was evacuated in January 1945.

After a few months in quarantine, he was put to work “in a very bad place, a field full of broken airplanes” where he and others salvaged parts. Given no tools or gloves, he felt his strength slipping away and he realized he’d likely not survive the job.

That’s when Opatowski decided to risk everything by approaching one of the kapos for help.

It was his first contact with Ziggy, but their paths would intersect often in the months ahead.

In the meantime, he was put to work maintaining the wires that were designed to keep prisoners. Many, at the end of their endurance, used the wires to commit suicide by throwing themselves on the high voltage lines. “When people committed suicide, it was our job to take them off. That happened every day,” Opatowski recalled.

By chance, Opatowski came into contact with a Hungarian woman on the other side of the wire. She threw him a rock with a message scrawled on it. He learned she was inquiring after her husband.

Opatowski later returned the rock by hurling it back into the women’s camp and his exploits in passing messages back and forth quickly came to the attention of the camp’s Polish underground.

They recruited him as a messenger and smuggler to the I.G. Farben synthetic rubber factory (Buna Works) in Monowitz, also known as Auschwitz III. In the morning, he would join a work group marched to the factory under the supervision of Kapo Ziggy. It was that same group of prisoners who would return to the main camp at Birkenau with dynamite stolen by female labourers at Buna, he said.

A British prisoner of war, (Charles Coward), known as the “Count of Auschwitz,”  helped organize the smuggling operation and Opatowski is confident Ziggy was in on the plot.

The dynamite was smuggled through circuitous means to the sonderkommando prisoners who worked in Birkenau’s four crematoria/gas chambers.

On Oct. 7, 1944 the prisoners attacked their SS guards and blew up the crematoria. Hundreds escaped but were quickly rounded up and killed. Opatowski, along with the two Polish underground members and many others were assembled at the SS headquarters and interrogated. One of the Poles died under torture and Opatowski said “I was lucky. I survived. Every time they tore [out] my fingernails, I fainted.”

Ziggy wasn’t so lucky. “A high officer” arrived on a motorcycle and “shot Ziggy practically in front of me.”

It was at that time that one of the Polish prisoners told him Ziggy had been on the St. Louis, but it was only after the war that he learned the full story of the ill-fated liner.

Opatowski survived the torture and spent the next few months on a labour detail repairing the crematoria. In January 1945 he and thousands of other prisoners were force-marched out of Auschwitz ahead of advancing Soviet forces.

He was liberated in Ebensee, a satellite labour camp of Mauthausen in Austria.

While it is believed many St. Louis passengers survived the war, those who were sent to Auschwitz were generally not among them. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “approximately 200 [St. Louis] passengers were deported from Belgium, France and the Netherlands to the Auschwitz and Sobibor killing centres in Poland, only four of whom are known to have survived.”