The Survival of Love: Memoirs of a Resistance Officer - Hardcover

In "Fighting Auschwitz", Jozef Garlinski told the story of resistance to the Nazi regime within its most infamous concentration camp. He relates the full story of his wartime experiences, from his mobilization into the Polish army in August 1939 and his marriage to Eileen, a British girl on holiday in Warsaw, to his eventual reunion with his wife in November 1945 in London. The intervening years were a harrowing experience for both Jozef and Eileen Garlinski. Separated by the German attack on Poland in 1939, Eileen made the decision to remain in Warsaw while Jozef fought at the front. Wounded in the campaign, Jozef managed to reunite with his wife, now working at the military hospital. Together they joined the Polish underground, fighting a secret war against the Gestapo. Betrayed by a former schoolmate in April 1943, Jozef Garlinski was arrested and sent, without any proof of guilt, to Auschwitz. Eileen remained in Warsaw, surviving the uprising of August and September 1944, in which 250,000 people died. When the Red Army invaded Poland, she fled the country, travelling to Odessa in a Russian cattle-truck, the only woman in a group of freed British prisoners of war, eventually arriving in Glasgow in April 1945 after a long voyage by ship. Jozef also survived, and following his liberation by the US army he spent a period of voluntary service rounding up the last SS men in the woods. A serious attack of typhus fever almost prevented him completing his journey in search of Eileen, but providence, again, won out. Via Frankfurt, Heidelberg and Paris, Jozef Garlinski was finally reunited with his wife in London.