There he met many of his contacts and was appointed second corridor sweeper and heard distant firing from the rising taking place in the Jewish ghetto outside the walls. Although no proof against him was produced, he was dispatched to Auschwitz, and then Birkenau, which had four gas chambers.

Garlinski was given a pair of striped pyjamas, had the number 121-421 tattooed on his arm and was sent to a penal company. He was separated from the main body of prisoners and therefore deprived of any contact with the Home Army.

His first job was building a sewer ditch, where the shoes, glasses and human bones of earlier workers emerged from the swampy ground. The company's day began before dawn.

There was a midday break for turnip soup, then the men returned at night to the music of the camp orchestra. After being given bread, the prisoners were forced to spend two hours carrying around earth, for which they reversed their shirts to use as pouches, knowing that a beating by SS men would follow if they fell down.

Garlinski was lucky in receiving regular food parcels from his wife and widowed mother and in being given a job in the kitchens, run by Russian prisoners.

He was moved to Neuganne camp, near Hamburg, and next to another at Wittenberg, where two attempts to rescue him were made. But the plan was abandoned after the outbreak of the Warsaw uprising; Eileen Garlinska, working under cover as a nurse, was the only Englishwoman to take part.

She was eventually captured, but escaped and made her way to England. When Garlinski was finally freed, he worked as an interpreter with the American Seventh Army Division until he caught typhus, then made his way to join her in London.

Taken from articles in the press and from the local Polish community in Staffordshire. and from files in the National Archives in Kew London  (formally the PRO),  FO 371/86679, FO 371/188794 and HS 4/137