Narrative

The Last Thief:

Zbigniew Książczak

The only one left of fifteen. The only one to share this story. The others were murdered to erase the evidence.  During the Warsaw Uprising a 16 year old thief was born. He was forced to rob Polish households of things valuable for the Nazis who would then ship them off to Germany. Now he is the last of his kind. Though he lost his faith in God, he believes in humanity, that in even the most evil of us there is still some sense of what is admirable, of what is right. This is the story of the last thief, of Zbigniew Książczak.

During the second world war but before the warsaw uprising Zbigniew and his father were separated from his mother and his sister and were forced to live in Pole Mokotowskie with 12 other tenants. From there they went to an isolated town in the countryside and had to sleep on hay in barns because there was not enough room anymore in pole mokotowskie.

Five years later, in 1944 Zbigniew decided he wanted to find his mom and he remembered that she had some friends living in Pyry so he hit the road with only a backpack. When he was almost there he encountered a German who was waiting with his cart and encouraging him to walk forward, and offered him a ride to Pyry. However when they arrived there were many German police trucks. People, including Zbigniew, were loaded onto the trucks and driven away. He was very disappointed; after going 5 years without being captured by the germans, he was caught just because he decided to trust a complete stranger. He started to cry.

Zbigniew and some other people who were captured were driven to a transition camp in Pruszków where 20,000 other citizens of Warsaw had passed. He often found himself wandering around the area. However, there was one problem; to be able to eat the soup that was distributed in the camp once a day, he needed a dish which he did not own. To solve this problem, he found a lamp shade from which he would eat. One day Polish men asked for volunteers to do work for the Nazis. Many people were up for the job, but only fifteen were chosen. Zbigniew was one of them.

Each morning, the Nazis chose two to three out of the fifteen workers who were driven to the remains of Warsaw after the liquidation. On the first day that Książczak was chosen for this task, he was driven to the downtown area of Warsaw where there was a surprising number of houses still standing. The workers jobs were to clear the houses of the items left behind by  their former residents. Zbigniew remembers how they did it up to this day. First, the thieves had to take down the door in the beautiful four or five room apartments. Afterwards, they stole the things that the Nazis asked them to, such as be sewing machines, bed linen, or porcelain. On the second day that Zbigniew was driven into warsaw the thieves were ordered to take leather, furs, and other similar goods. Książczak remembers with sorrow that it looked as if the families that were ushered out of the homes just minutes before. Dirty plates, unmade beds, and food lying on the table created this image.

Another day the thieves were driven to Nowogrodzka Street. This time they were told to take the bed linen. On the fourth floor they found a library. Through the window of the room they saw two Nazis sitting in a room, lighting a fire in the centre of the room. Książczak and his friend Witek quickly ran down the stairs, got moist earth since there was no water, and put out the fire. When he visited Nowogrodzka after the war, the house they saved was the only one left standing, Nowogrodzka 25.

On another trip, when Zbigniew and Witek found the library once again, the German that was accompanying them saw the Polish books. Furiously he kicked open the cabinets, shattering the glass doors, and started stomping and jumping on the books, therefore destroying them. This terrified Zbigniew, but also disgusted him.

One day after the thieves returned to the camp from a day of collecting bed sheets, when everyone was heading back to the barracks, the Nazi accompanying them told Zbigniew to climb onto the back of the truck with the bed sheets. As Zbigniew later recalled, this command saved his life. He told us he rode in the back of the truck for approximately 40 minutes and when the truck finally stopped, he realized he was in Włochy, a district of Warsaw. There a group of Nazis surrounded him and started beating and kicking him horribly. At this point, Zbigniew explained, he lost his faith in God. Through the legs kicking him everywhere, he saw that they were wearing belts saying “Gott Mitt Uns”, God With Us. He couldn’t understand why God would help in such a horrible deed.

When he got away from the ruthless group, Książczak wandered through the silent, lonely Warsaw for a 106 empty days. It was during these solitary days that he realized there are both honourable and dreadful Germans. When he went searching for his mother, he encountered an atrocious one who stripped him of his freedom. When he was saved, he encountered an exceptional one.

Thankfully, Zbigniew found his mother in March in 1945. She was working in an ammunitions factory located near Berlin. Unfortunately, his sister did not make it. 2 days after she was married at the age of 19 she died in to a bomb attack. Zbigniew learned that his sister’s unfortunate death was after she and her mother  were relocated from their house into a nearby school. Zbigniew’s mother was sitting at a desk, while his sister was lying on a mattress near the wall. Suddenly, a bomb dropped and when his mother looked up again, all she could lay eyes on was sky because the whole wall was gone. “These are the realities of war,” Zbigniew told us.

The first day that Warsaw was unoccupied, January 17, 1945, Zbigniew went back with his father to the barracks where they had been detained in before he had his life spared and had ventured out to search for his mother. Outside he found 14 graves and he suspected that they were of his 14 thieving companions. He was the only one who survived the erasure of possible evidence of crimes. However, Zbigniew tried his best to find the rest of the ‘thieves’ in case they were still alive. He tried sending out messages on the television, the radio, and put up advertisements. No one showed up. Eventually, one young woman came who witnessed the looted items being loaded onto the trains in Włochy but had no other information.

Eventually, Zbigniew was interviewed by Anna Pakulska for the newspaper Nowe Państwo in an article titled Ostatni Taki Rabuś, “The Last Thief”. At the end of the interview he stated that the Polish government should ask the German government for a refund of the stolen items. Zbigniew said that if there ever was a court case for this, he would be a witness.

When we asked , “How do you feel about being here today and sharing your story with us?”, he answered, “I feel like I am passing on a part of Poland.” It seemed very important to him that we never forget what happened and that even the people we think most evil will have some sense of what is right.