The answer came to him through an unlikely source: the sickening smell of decaying human flesh. There,only a few feet from his work, he saw a pile of bodies that had been shoveled into the back of a truck -men, women, and children, who had been gassed. The gold fillings had been pulled from their teeth; everything that they owned -any jewelry-even their clothing, had been taken.
Instead of asking, "How could the Nazis be so despicable, so destructive? How could God make something so evil?Why has God done this to me?," Stanislavsky Lech asked a different question. He asked, "How can I use this to escape?" And instantly he got his answer.
As the end of the day neared and the work party headed back into the barracks, Lech ducked behind the truck. In a heartbeat, he ripped off his clothes and dove naked into the pile of bodies while no one was looking. He pretended that he was dead, remaining totally still even though later he was almost crushed as more and more bodies were heaped on top of him.
The fetid smell of rotting flesh, the rigid remains of the dead surrounded him everywhere. He waited and waited, hoping that no one would notice the one living body in that pile of death, hoping that sooner or later the truck would drive off.
Finally, he heard the sound of the engine starting. He felt the truck shudder. And in that moment, he felt a stirring of hope as he lay among the dead. Eventually, he felt the truck lurch to a stop, and then it dumped its ghastly cargo-dozens of the dead and one man pretending to be one of them-in a giant open grave outside the camp. Lech remained there for hours until nightfall. When he finally felt certain no one was there, he extracted himself from the mountain of cadavers, and he ran naked twenty-five miles to freedom...............
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