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Jerzy Tabeau (18 December 1918 – 11 May 2002), an imprisoned Polish medical student, was one of the first escapees from Auschwitz to give a detailed report to the outside world on the genocide occurring there. First reports in early 1942 had been made by the Polish officer Witold Pilecki. Zabłotów-born Tabeau's report was known as that of the "Polish major" in the Auschwitz Protocols. After the war, he became a noted cardiologist in Kraków.[1]
Tabeau was a member of the Union of Armed Struggle, Związek Walki Zbrojnej (ZWZ) and had worked in the Polish underground under the pseudonym "Jerzy Wesołowski" in Kraków, distributing underground press. He was captured and taken to the Gestapo's Montelupich Prison in Kraków. On 25 March 1942, he was transferred to Auschwitz, and - still under his false name - registered under the number 27273. He soon fell ill with pneumonia and pleurisy, and was placed in the camp hospital. After recovering, he joined the hospital staff as a nurse. In the summer of 1942 he came down with typhus and was selected by Nazi doctor Dr. Josef Klehr to be included in the list of patients to be killed in the gas chambers. However, thanks to an intervention by the Polish block elder, Alfred Stossel, he managed to escape death.[2]
Tabeau escaped with another Polish inmate, Roman Cieliczko, on 19 November 1943. The escape was pre-planned in July 1943 and originally intended to include five prisoners escape. As Cieliczko was in the camp under his given name, not a pseudonym, it was essential to first warn Cieliczko's mother in Zakopane to go into hiding. Escapees' relatives were often captured in reprisal.[3] On 14 July 1943, a message was sent to Cieliczko's mother to go into hiding.[4][5][6] Tabeau and Cieliczko escaped by cutting through the camp's wire fence. They made their way to the village of Goczałkowice where local Resistance welcomed them, then continued on to Zakopane and stayed with friends of Cieliczko. Tabeau boarded a freight train to Kraków, while Cieliczko joined a partisan unit but was killed by German troops in a sabotage operation three months later.[7] Tabeau contacted Teresa Lasocka-Estreicher, and later joined the underground Kraków PPS. In December 1943, Tabeau proceeded to prepare a report about the camp. The work was completed in early 1944.
In March, on the orders of the Underground, he left Kraków on a mission to London to give testimony in person about the Polish resistance and confirm to the Allies the truth about the Nazi genocide. The journey took place without incident. After returning to Poland, he went to the Nowy Sącz area to form a "Socialist Death Battalion." During one of the battles near Jordanów in October 1944, Tabeau was wounded in the head, leaving him partially paralysed. However, he lived to see the end of the war. After 1945, he settled in Kraków, completing his medical studies and graduating from the Jagiellonian University. He became an assistant professor of medicine, and a well-known cardiologist in Kraków.
