Jozef Paczynski, Inmate Barber to Auschwitz Commandant, Dies at 95
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Version 0 of 1. Jozef Paczynski, a Polish Army captain who spent much of his five-year imprisonment in Auschwitz as the personal barber to Rudolf Höss, the Nazi death camp’s commandant, died on Sunday in Krakow. He was 95. His death was announced by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. Mr. Paczynski was 20 when he was captured crossing into Slovakia trying to flee German-occupied Poland to join Polish freedom fighters in France. He was among the first 700 young prisoners transported to Auschwitz in June 1940, assigned No. 121. He would remain at the camp in Poland until Jan. 18, 1945, when the Germans moved him just days before the Soviet Army arrived, making him one of Auschwitz’s longest-surviving inmates. He was later freed by American troops. Mr. Paczynski owed his survival, in part, to getting an indoor assignment as an apprentice barber in a shop where SS officers had their hair cut. After Höss’s regular barber, a convicted criminal, was arrested for stealing perfume, Mr. Paczynski — identified by Höss as the “kleine Pole,” the small Pole — was accompanied to the commandant’s villa, where Höss’ wife escorted him to an upstairs bathroom. “I work with 10 Warsaw hairstylists, fantastic professionals, and it is me who is to give Höss a haircut? How? Good God! I was terrified!” Mr. Paczynski told The Irreversible, an oral history project. “I shaved his hair over his ears with a razor and trimmed the rest with a shaving machine. My hands trembled terribly. We never exchanged a single word. I was afraid and he was disgusted. And so almost every week for over four years I would go give Rudolf Höss a haircut. And he never spoke to me. Never!” Mr. Paczynski elaborated in “Auschwitz: A New History” (2005) by Laurence Rees, recalling that Höss was smoking a cigar and reading a newspaper. He was often asked why, with motive and opportunity, he did not slit Höss’s throat. “I had a razor in my hand,” he said. “I could have cut his throat — it could have happened. But I’m a thinking being, and you know what would have happened? My whole family would have been destroyed; half of the camp would be destroyed. In his place someone else would have come.” Höss, who installed gas chambers and converted Auschwitz into a death camp, was sentenced to death and hanged in 1947. Mr. Paczynski, who witnessed mass exterminations at Auschwitz, testified at war-crimes trials that led to the convictions of SS guards for crimes against humanity. Information on survivors was not available. In later years he was an engineering teacher. In 2001 he was honored with the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Rebirth of Poland. |