WARSAW, Poland ? Jerzy Bielecki, a Polish inmate who led his Jewish girlfriend out of Auschwitz in 1944, has died at age 90.
Bielecki's daughter, Alicja Januchowski said Saturday that he died peacefully Thursday at his home in Nowy Targ, in southern Poland.
In July 1944, the 23-year-old Bielecki used his relatively privileged position as a German-speaking Catholic Polish inmate of Auschwitz to orchestrate the daring rescue of his Jewish girlfriend, Cyla Cybulska, who was doomed to die.
From a fellow Polish inmate working at a uniform warehouse he secretly got a complete SS uniform and a pass.
Pretending he was taking a Jewish inmate out of the camp for interrogation, he led Cybulska to a side gate, where a sleepy SS-man let them go through.
The fear of being gunned down remained with him in his first steps of freedom: "I felt pain in my backbone, where I was expecting to be shot," Bielecki said in an interview with the AP in 2010.
For more than a week they hid in the fields during the day and marched during the night, until they reached the house of Bielecki's uncle. There, they were separated as the family wanted Bielecki back home in Krakow, and Cybulska had to hide with a farming family.
They failed to meet after the war.
Bielecki stayed in Poland and settled in Nowy Targ, where he raised a family. Cybulska married a Jewish man, David Zacharowitz, with whom she went to Sweden and then to New York.
Sheer chance made them meet again. While talking to her Polish cleaning woman in 1982, Cybulska related her Auschwitz escape story.
The woman, stunned, said she had heard Bielecki tell the story on Polish TV. She helped Cybulska find Bielecki in Poland. In the summer of 1982 they met at Krakow airport. He brought 39 red roses, one for each year they spent apart.
In 1985, the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem awarded Bielecki the Righteous Among the Nations title for saving Cybulska.
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