Kazimierz Wojciechowski

He was involved in the education of the youth, and after the Nazi invasion of Poland was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned at Montelupich, and subsequently deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was murdered by two prisoner functionaries the day after arrival.

Owing to the efforts of his mother struggling single-handedly to support the family he was enrolled at the age of 8 at the Salesian-run boarding school for poor children (the Zakład Salezjański im.

He then taught for a year at a Salesian minor seminary in Daszawa [pl] near Stryj in Poland (now Stryi in Ukraine), on his return to Kraków taking on the duties of a catechist in elementary schools and those of a director of an oratorium and patron of Catholic youth organizations.

The next day, 27 June 1941, Wojciechowski was impressed into a disciplinary work detail, the so-called Straf­kompanie consisting of 12 prisoners engaged in gruelling excavation of the gravel yard that bordered on the concentration camp — the now famous historic site known in Polish as Żwirowisko and in German as Kiesplatz.

During the morning shift of that day the supervising kapo broke Wojciechowski's teeth with a single blow from a shovel handle and separately injured his head with a lash from a riding crop.

On the afternoon shift he was beaten again and when he complained he was thrown into a previously excavated gravel pit, told to lie down next to another Salesian friar, Franciszek Harazim (1885–1941; inmate number 17375), whom he observed lying at the bottom of the pit in a state of unconsciousness, and together with him was suffocated to death by having a single wooden pole thrown across both his and Harazim's necks, which was then weighed down by the bodies of two prisoner functionaries — a kapo and a barrack leader (blockälteste) — who stood on the pole at either end.