Adolf Gawalewicz Adolf Gawalewicz ( born 2 September 1916 in Lvov ; d . 11 June 1987 in Cracow ) was a Polish jurist and writer best remembered for his valuable memoirs from his years at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps . Life and work . Gawalewicz spent his childhood and high - school years in Lvov , graduating from " gimnazjum " in 1935 , and then in June 1939 obtained a law degree from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow . He worked for a time in the municipal administration of the city of Cracow . After the Nazi invasion of Poland he participated in underground resistance and in distribution of underground publications , activities for which he was arrested by the Nazis on 16 September 1940 and incarcerated in the Montelupich Prison . On 9 January 1941 he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp where he was assigned inmate number 9225 . Władysław Fejkiel ( 19111995 ) reports that in the winter 1941 / 42 Gawalewicz was brought to the camp ' s infirmary in a state of unconsciousness and such extreme emaciation that his body weight could not have been more than 35 kg and the first thought of a medic was to prepare a death certificate . Yet , the nightmare of Auschwitz was extended for Gawalewicz to nearly three and a half years , and afterwards it continued for him from the middle of June 1944 onwards at the Nazi concentration camps successively of Buchenwald , Dachau , Mittelbau - Dora , Ellrich , and Bergen - Belsen . At the time of his liberation by British forces he was in a state of total exhaustion and afflicted by a serious pulmonary condition . In view of this he was evacuated to a sanatorium in Sweden on 24 June 1945 where owing to a successful lung operation and a lengthy convalescence his health was partly restored . He returned to Poland on 5 July 1946 and resumed his work in the municipal administration of Cracow . In 1948 he obtained a doctorate in law with a thesis on the " Implications of the Nazi Occupation of Poland on the Laws of Civil Administration " . He then dedicated himself to writing , authoring numerous publications and articles in the field of Nazi concentration camps studies as well as in his professional domain of jurisprudence . His most famous book is " Refleksje z poczekalni do gazu : ze wspomnień muzułmana " ( " Reflections in the Gas Chamber ' s Waiting Room : From the Memoirs of a Muselmann " ) first published in 1968 ( 3rd ed . , 2000 ) , which , apart from being a personal memoir , is a study of the moral questions posed by the specific conditions of a Nazi concentration camp experience . The text ranks among the preeminent testimonials of such Holocaust survivors as Tadeusz Borowski , Halina Birenbaum , Primo Levi , and Elie Wiesel , who addressed the question of the moral choice . Giorgio Agamben , for his part , chose to highlight Gawalewicz ' s observation that the abnormal conditions of the camp accounted for the aggravation of the normal physical and psychological differences between men : " Camp conditions made these differences more pronounced , and we often witnessed reversals of the roles played by physical and psychological factors " ( so Gawalewicz as quoted by Agamben ) . Patricia Treece brings out Gawalewicz ' s sophisticated analysis of the six distinct ways in which the concentration - camp system served the larger ( but not readily apparent ) purposes of Nazi Germany . Gawalewicz participated as a material witness in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials in the 1960s . During the trial he sparred with the Nazi war criminal , Josef Klehr . The transcript of the exchange was published ( in the original German version ) in Hermann Langbein ' s monumental " Der Auschwitz - Prozess : eine Dokumentation " ( 1965 ) . During the post - War discussions on the final shape that Auschwitz was to assume for posterity ( as a museum ) , he expressed the opinion , which he believed would be shared by all former inmates ( as opposed to those who never experienced the camp as it was in real life ) , that as much as possible should be left completely intact , without any decorative or modernizing changes , especially in the outdoor spaces . For he wrote for a former prisonerevery perspective of the external structure , every stair , every brick or what might otherwise seem an insignificant detail is invested with the memory of the immeasurable immensity of suffering and dignity , of degradation and pride . Likewise the vision of dearest friends the fellow inmates is inextricably bound up with the camp as it was when " they " existed . He died suddenly in Cracow on 11 June 1987 .