On November 6, 1942, seventy Soviet prisoners of war staged an extraordinary mass escape from Auschwitz. Among the escapees was prisoner number 1418, Andrey Pogozhev. One of the few who managed to evade the pursuing Nazi guards, Pogozhev lived to tell his story in this singular chronicle of wartime survival.

 

Pogozhev was caught by the Germans in 1941 and immediately sent to Auschwitz. He and his Red Army comrades were then put to work on the Birkenau construction site. Sick, starving, and forced to work in sub-zero weather, more than three hundred Russian prisoners died in a single day. Pogohzev vividly recounts what life was like inside Auschwitz, how a group of prisoners managed to organize and execute one of the few successful escapes from Auschwitz, and his punishing journey as a fugitive fleeing through the Carpathian Mountains into the Ukraine.