On 29 April 1940, Michal was abducted by a Gestapo roundup on Marszałkowska Street—a street he walked often while visiting his family in Warsaw. Though he heard the warning shouts from others trying to escape, for Michal it was too late.
That sunny April day cast a long, dark shadow over Michal that reached across the Atlantic and deep into the 1970s when he put pen to paper and recorded the atrocities he witnessed and lived as Prisoner No. 24399 in Berlin, and Prisoner No. 43155 in Austria.
This posthumous memoir of Michal Palewski testifies to unimaginable evil; it cries out to all humanity: “One must not allow for this dreadful and tragic history of the Nazi crimes to repeat itself ever again.”
