Scoutmaster Podcast 270

I'm Rolf Ostpog and I'm the committee chair with troop number 457 in Greenwood Village, Colorado. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me.

And now for you, Scoutmaster. Well, this has never happened before, but two people sent me the same joke this week. That's gotta mean something, right, We'll find out. Both Bryce Liggett and Randy Farmer sent me an email with exactly the same joke.

So here we go. It's all their fault.

Do you know that you can't run in camp? It's impossible. You can only ran in camp Now.

Do you know why that is? Because if you're running in camp it's past tense. I will give you Randy and Bryce's email,

Okay, And forward all your messages to them. Thanks, guys, I think. Hey, this is podcast number 270.. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green.

I want to say how much I appreciate hearing from folks and you can get in touch with me anytime at all at Clark at scoutmastercgcom. I did note a new review on my book So Far, So Good on Amazon by Edzel Huertaiz. He said it's an engaging story with a great message for adult volunteers about what it means to have youth lead their own troop. Easy read for understanding the patrol method If you haven't checked out.

So Far, So Good- a new Scoutmaster story. Take a moment, go take a look. They are on the website at scoutmastercgcom.

And before we go any further, I want to ask you to do something for me. If you're a regular reader and listener and if the resources that we've created have helped you, I am asking you to return the favor by becoming a scoutmastercgcom backer. It's really easy to do.

Go to scoutmastercgcom, click the support link at the top of the page and you can choose from a number of options that you can help support this work, And one of them is getting a copy of So Far, So Good- a new Scoutmaster story and my other books. Now, the funds that I get from backers go to cover the expenses of producing and publishing everything that we do, including what you're listening to right now.

I want to take a moment this week to personally thank Lou Loeb, Tim Charter, James Lorkowski, Bill Skurl and Ralph Asbaugh, who've all become backers since our last podcast. Once again, go to scoutmastercgcom and become a backer this week And I'll make sure to thank you personally on the next podcast.

Now, in this week's podcast, I've got one thing that I'm really excited to share with you. It's a story And it's a true story, And so I'm taking all of the email questions that I got this past week, putting them on hold because I wanted to reserve the rest of this podcast for this really incredible story I learned about recently.

So hey, let's get started, shall we?

Now, as I sit here recording this, I can look over at a frame on my wall that has a bunch of patches and pins in it. They're souvenirs of one of the most memorable events I ever attended as a scouter. Let me tell you a story connected to it, And it's an inspiring story that takes us back 73 years. Almost to the day, on June 20, 1942, a German soldier was guarding a gate in Poland And an officer's car approached the gate, And in that car there were four armed SS officers, And the guard hesitated for a moment, But then one of the SS officers started cursing and hollering at him.

And well, that's getting a little ahead of ourselves. Now stick with me, because the story I want to tell you about is the story of the man who was in the car and yelled at that guard, Because that man's name is Kazik, And you and I and your scouts have a lot more in common with Kazik than you might first think. Kazik grew up in the town of Tcev in Poland And he went swimming with his friends in the nearby river Vistula, which at that time was the border of Poland and Germany. And when he was 10, Kazik joined the scouts.

Now think about this: When Kazik was 10 years old, Poland was a newly independent state set up after the First World War, And the scouting movement in Poland at that time had a strong focus on nationalism and patriotism and toughness and brotherhood. And Kazik remembers going home and telling his mother that he joined the scouts and his mother crying a little bit, almost breaking down into tears, and telling him: I am so happy, son, that you are on the right way.

So Kazik and his fellow scouts played in the park in Tcev and they did what scouts do. Now Kazik is 19 years old in 1939 when the Nazis invaded across the Vistula into Poland And the invaders looked at the scouting movement as a symbol of nationalism and a potential source of resistance. And four days after Germany declared war on Poland, they arrived in Kazik's little town of Tcev and they rounded up Kazik's childhood friends who were in scouts and they executed them.

Now if you go to Tcev. Today there's a monument in the same park where Kazik and his friends played, to those scouts who the Nazis executed so early on. But Kazik was fortunate in that he was able to escape from Tcev and he attempted to cross the Hungarian border with many other Polish scouts at the time who were trying to get through to France to join the free Polish forces that were being assembled there to fight the Nazis. But Kazik was captured as he tried to cross the border and he spent the next eight months being shuttled around from one prison to another until they ended up in a new addition of a prison camp that had surpassed its capacity for the hundreds and thousands of people the Nazis were interring in these prison camps, and the camp that Kazik ended up in would become infamous for its brutality, its executions, and it's a place we all know the name of today. In the work camp, Kazik became prisoner 918.. One of the jobs, one of the horrible things he had to do, was with another prisoner, taking the corpses of recently executed prisoners, throwing them on a cart and taking them to a crematorium.

He speaks of his first three months in that camp as just being in total shock, but he was one of many scouts who were interred in this camp and they formed their own resistance movement. Now, it's because many of them spoke German, they were able to secure positions in the camp, and some were even able to secure positions that allowed them to have access to the prisoner files.

Now Kazik was devastated when his Ukrainian friend, Agunish Bandera, who he called Negenik, told him that one of the people who had access to the prisoner files had just told Negenik that he was slated for execution himself. So Kazik, Negenik, another boy scout, Stanislaw Jaster, and a priest who was in turn in the camp, named Joseph Lempert, began conspiring about how they could escape before Negenik was to be executed.

So for days they thought and planned, and then, on June 20th 1942, the conspirators met together and ran through their escape plan for just the last time. Before Kazik and his three friends attempted their escape, they said a prayer for their families and the four of them agreed that if their escape attempt failed, they would shoot themselves before the Nazis had an opportunity to execute them.

Now, according to their plan, they picked up a rubbish cart and managed to convince the guard at the inner gate that they were work detail, just, you know, picking up trash and their luck held, as that guard waved them past the gate, bearing the infamous phrase arbeit macht frei, which is German for work makes you free. So Kazik and his friends made their way past the inner gate to a storeroom where Kazik before had removed a bolt to make sure they would get access. They broke down one of the doors and they dressed themselves in officers uniforms and Negenik got into the garage at the camp with a copied key and got a car and brought it around to the storeroom.

Now Negenik was a mechanic at the camp and he chose the Steyr 220, the fastest car in the garage that was reserved for the camp commandant, so he could quickly move between the camp and Berlin. And, of course, escaping from the camp, they wanted the fastest vehicle that they could get.

So they all got into the Steyr and they drove to the outer main gate, not knowing whether they would need papers or a pass, not knowing what would happen next, and the plan was that Kazik would play the role of an SS officer so convincingly that the guards at that outer gate would obey and let the car through. So they began covering the distance to that gate and the guard didn't move: 60 yards, 50 yards, 40 yards out, still no move. Kazik looked at his friend Negenik who was driving, but with 20 yards to go, the gate was still closed. They finally got to the gate, Negenik stopped the car. Kazik stared blankly ahead when Josef the priest socked him in the shoulder and whispered, desperate, where Kazik could do something. Kazik sprang into action and screamed in German: wake up you buggers, open up or all open you up.

And with that the guards of the gate jumped and obeyed and lifted the barrier and Kazik and his friends drove to freedom, becoming four of 144 prisoners to successfully escape the death camp Auschwitz. Now the architect of that incredible escape, Kazimierz Pracowski, is alive today and lives in the little town where he was a scout into Cev, Poland, and is just a living testament to how the scout motto, which in Polish is ciewaj and we know it in in English as be prepared, can be something much more than words on a piece of paper. It can become a lifeline to survival.

Now, after they escaped, Kazik returned to Poland ultimately and joined the partisan Polish home army and spent the rest of the war fighting the Nazis. When Poland became a communist state in 1947, Kazik was sentenced to 10 years in prison for being a member of the home army. He served seven of those years and he was released in his 30s.

He became an engineer and then lived there in Poland until the communist regime fell in 1989 and he took to traveling the world with his wife, Iga, and he's written two books in polish about his experiences, and he tries to ensure that no one will forget what happened in Auschwitz. When he's asked if it's difficult to relive this terrifying past, he says: I was a scout, so I have to do my duty, be cheerful and merry. And he says very simply: I'll be a scout until the end of my life.

Now, after Kazik and his friends escaped from Auschwitz, the Nazis were incensed and they were frustrated by their inability to recapture those prisoners. So within a month after the escape, an order went out that every person in Auschwitz would be tattooed with their prison number on their forearm.

Remember that frame of souvenirs I told you about some minutes ago? Well, they came from an event that I attended nearly 30 years ago, just before the fall of the communist government in Poland in 1989.

In the summer of 1988, the association of Polish scouts in exile held their world jamboree at our scout camp and one memorable event during their two-week stay was a reunion of scouts who had been inmates of the Nazi concentrations camps, and I remember very vividly them showing me that tattoo of the prison number on their forearm because, like Kazik, they had all kept scouting alive. They kept scouting alive through the Nazi occupation, through the unbelievable horror of being in one of the concentration camps, and throughout the Polish diaspora that came after the war and the establishment of the communist government in Poland in 1947 till 1998. One of the things that the Poles kept alive was their scouting movement. It went with them wherever they went in the world, and in the summer of 1988, there at our camp, a couple thousand people from all over the world came together to renew that spirit of scouting, to renew their love of country and of culture, and that's where my frame full of souvenirs comes from.

Now I want to tell you, too, that what you've been hearing playing here is a song about Kazik and his escape. It's called Commander Carr and it's written and performed by Katie Carr, and I'll have a link about how you can get this song in the post that contains this podcast. And keep an eye at scoutmastercgcom, because tomorrow I'm going to publish a short documentary film about Kazik, and I'll give you some more links to his story and the story of other Scouts during the Second World War.

And I thought it was important to share this story with you today, because scouting is so much more than we suspect that it really is, isn't it? It's it's not merely what happens at our meetings and activities.

It's something so much deeper and broader, and we see this in stories like Kazik's. We'll likely never have to take on the challenges that Kazik did, but his life and his story is a testimony to the strength of the scout spirit, and that's something we can all share in.