Zbigniew Marian Haszlakiewicz was just 20 years old, engaged as a tutor in the Polish Underground School of the Tarnow area, when he was apprehended by the Gestapo. Mercilessly tortured for days, he refused to give the Germans any useful information and nearly died protecting his comrades. After months of imprisonment and recovery from his torture, young Zbigniew was transferred to the first of five concentration camps—Auschwitz. After this, on to Birkenau, then Buchenwald, and Mittelbau (DORA), and finally, Bergen-Belsen.

Author Zbigniew Marian Haszlakiewicz was born into wealthy Polish nobility on August 19, 1922, in Stolin, Poland (now Belarus). His life of privilege began to unravel in 1930 when his father died and stopped altogether when his mother died in 1932. Orphaned at the age of ten, he was taken in by an uncle and his wife to a farm 100 miles south in what is now Ukraine. He had just begun his final year of secondary school in 1939 when World War II broke out. The family of three escaped the Soviet incursion by finding shelter in south-central Poland. It is there, in the spring of 1943, the author’s two-year ordeal began with his capture by the Nazis Gestapo.

After being liberated by the British in 1945, Mr. Haszlakiewicz remained in Germany, married, started a family, and earned a degree in Urban Planning from the Braunschweig Polytechnic. In 1951, the family of three emigrated to the U.S. and settled in Chicago, Illinois, where he had a successful career as a structural engineer. After retiring to Florida in 1987, family and friends convinced him to write down what he experienced in the Nazis concentration camps. The original edition of “Madness of the XX Century” was self-published in 1998. Zbigniew Marian Haszlakiewicz died in 2009. He was 86 years old.

Author Zbigniew Marian Haszlakiewicz writes, “For centuries, my family lived in the eastern territories of the Polish Commonwealth. They survived many disasters, wars, invasions, rebellions, and over one hundred years of methodical Russification efforts by the Russian czarist regime. After the First World War and after the Polish victory over Lenin’s Red Army in 1920, only a part of these territories were included within the borders of the Republic of Poland. A modern Polish state was developing for nineteen years. Despite some friction between ethnic groups (Polish, Ukrainian, Jewish, Byelorussian, German, etc.), life in Poland was peaceful and pleasant compared to what was going on in those days in Germany and, in particular, across the eastern border—in the Soviet Union. The turmoil by both big neighbors of Poland was the prelude to an aggression. In September 1939, the Hakenkreuz from the west and the hammer and sickle from the east started rolling. Poland was overrun and occupied: the western half by Nazi Germany and the eastern half by Soviet Russia.”

Published by Page Publishing, Zbigniew Marian Haszlakiewicz’s intense account takes readers into the horrors of concentration camps.

Readers who wish to experience this unforgettable work can purchase “Madness of The XX Century: A Testimony” at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes Store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble.

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