...Paul Szczurek arrived in Auschwitz in October 1940. He held various positions within the camp and worked not only at censorship office for letters and parcels for prisoners but also as a guard and block leader. At Auschwitz Szczurek turned into a sadist who beat and tormented prisoners regardless of their gender and age.
As the block leader at blocks 10 and 22, Paul Szczurek enjoyed organizing roll calls.
During roll calls the prisoners were lined up in rows of ten and then counted, which sometimes took hours and could be especially tormenting for the prisoners, particularly in the bad weather. Some SS guards organized roll calls which lasted from 5.00 a.m. to the late in the evening hours. Due to freezing weather and exhaustion, many prisoners collapsed and were then taken to the gas chambers.
Szczurek also took part in selections on the rail ramp, The process of selection and murder was carefully planned and organized. When a train stopped at the platform, the arrivals were lined up into two columns – men and boys in one, women and girls in the other. The SS physicians such as Josef Mengele performed a selection. The only criterion was the appearance of the prisoners, whose fate, for labor or for death, was determined at will. Szczurek – when supervising with other SS men the loading of prisoners who were to be transported in cars to the gas chambers – behaved inhumanly, and tortured the inmates in a cruel way, beating the women, the men and the children with a stick or a cane while forcing them into the cars.
The SS men kept the people fated to die unaware of what awaited them. They were told that they were being sent to the camp where work was waiting for them, but first they had to undergo disinfection and bathe.
They were then told politely to hang their clothes on the hooks, take a shower and were even promised they would be provided with soup and tea or coffee. However they were taken into the gas chambers, locked in, and killed with Zyklon B gas.
Between 1942 and 1944, more than 40 Auschwitz sub-camps, exploiting the prisoners as slave laborers, were founded, mainly at various sorts of German industrial plants and farms. In one of them, Monowitz-Buna, Paul Szczurek was also deployed.
Paul Szczurek remained in the camp until December 1944 or January 1945 when Soviet forces approached the Auschwitz concentration camp complex and the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps. These forced marches of concentration camp prisoners became known as the death marches.
After the end of the war, Szczurek was tried at the Auschwitz Trial which began on the 24th of November 1947 and lasted one month.
On the 22nd of December 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow sentenced Szczurek to death by hanging. He was 39 years old when he was executed on the 24th of January 1948.
