Prior to the outbreak of World War II, he attended Paderewski Gymnasium (secondary school) and was a member of the boy scouts.
He served as a liaison officer for the area command of the Union of Armed Struggle (Związek Walki Zbrojnej, or ZWZ), first in Tarnów and then later in Częstochowa.
Sobolewicz was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp on 20 November 1941, where he was issued a striped uniform, wooden clogs, a red triangle badge for political prisoners and the number 23053.
[5] In Mülsen, on 1 May 1944, Soviet prisoners staged an uprising and mass escape attempt from the camp located in the arms factory cellars.
On the night of 23 April 1945, as the American army was approaching from the north, the SS evacuated the prisoners on a nine-day death march south and east toward the Austrian border.
Towards the end of the march, with the remaining prisoners suffering from severe hunger and exhaustion and word spreading that Hitler had committed suicide and that the American Army was closing in on them, Sobolewicz and some comrades managed to escape the march by hiding in the hayloft of a barn and the SS ultimately abandoned the rest of the surviving prisoners.
But he had to endure the loss of his father, who was gassed in Birkenau on 20 June 1942, his grandfather, who was shot dead by SS henchmen for helping Jewish friends, his cousin, who was murdered in the Katyń massacre, and many others.
When his book was first published, it was awarded the first prize at the Polish Auschwitz Recollections Competition organized by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 1985.