As the world commemorates the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,reporter Rachel Sharp talks to a Polish man who recounts the horrors of his time in the Nazi concentration camp.

A PRISONER of war was facing almost certain death in a prison cell with 13 others, lined up waiting to see who would be selected for execution by German soldiers.

He was spared death, only to be sent to Auschwitz.

Prior to that, Jerzy Cynk, 79, was in the Polish underground army, and was arrested and taken prisoner in Poland on June 21, 1943.

"Almost everyone in Poland was involved in the underground uprising in some way," he said. "The Germans didn't even need to have an excuse to arrest you, they just did. I was taken to prison, where I witnessed the executions of about 300 Jews women and children.

"The Germans selected prisoners for execution by walking down a line and pointing fingers at people.

"The worst moment of my life was in July, about a month after I was arrested. We knew there was something dreadful going on, and there were about 14 of us in a cell when one of the soldiers came in. He was slowly walking down the line of men, pointing out who would be executed, and then he stopped in front of me, and he pointed his finger."

Telling me the story while sitting in the officers' mess at RAF Northolt, where he is a well-respected authority on the base's history, the usually animated Jerzy suddenly becomes very still, and very quiet. There is a long pause before he begins to speak again, but his voice is much quieter. "It was the worst moment of my life," he says. "The worst. I thought it was all over. It is something I didn't talk about for a very long time. For 20 years I did not even tell my wife."

Incredibly, the soldier decided against selecting Jerzy for execution, and Jerzy was sent to Auschwitz the following month.

He said: "I was immediately tattooed with my prison number when I arrived, and was sent to work in the hospital, because I was qualified in first aid. I was lucky in many ways, I could have been sent outside to work.

"It was not unusual for people to die working outside. They would be in freezing conditions, exhausted, with little food. If a prisoner died, the other prisoners would carry the body back to the camp at the end of the day. Because if the number of prisoners did not add up when they got back, they would be made to stand outside while the Germans re-counted everybody over and over.

"Sometimes they could be out there for seven or eight hours being counted. They would get a couple of hours sleep before starting work again in the morning. Many died from exhaustion."

Working in the hospital Jerzy witnessed what he calls "the masquerade of the Germans". He tells me: "They were masters at it, at covering things up.

"The people in the hospital who were showing no signs of getting better after four or six weeks were visited by the SS doctors and guards.

"They were told they were going somewhere better to get well. They brought in barbers, washed their hair and shaved them, and gave them clean prison clothes. Then they led them out to the gas chambers to kill them. It was unbelievable to us that they went to all the effort to do this."

Jerzy, who lives in London, tells me that some prisoners were killed for no other reason than if an officer took a dislike to them.

He says: "I remember one SS man who would drown people in a bucket of water. He would just hold their head under until they died because he didn't like them. Things like this were common. We saw dead bodies every day."

Jerzy firmly believes the only way he managed to get through his time in the notorious concentration camp was by having hope.He said: "I was an incurable optimist. You had to believe every day that you would soon be liberated.

"My friend told me one day he could no longer go on in the conditions. He was dead in less than two weeks. It made me realise that you had to always have hope."

Jerzy was taken away from Aushwitz late in 1944 to work in other prison camps, before he was finally liberated on May 3, 1945.

He believes it is imperative that people know about the Holocaust, and make sure it never happens again.

"I had seen atrocious things. Thousands of people being killed, the stench of bodies being burnt in the crematoria, big holes dug with bodies just thrown in, Jews in the hospital dying in terrible pain as the SS doctors experimented on them."

I ask him how he manages to live with the memory of all the horror, and he is quiet again for a moment.

"It happened," he says. "It will always be there. A memory, and part of my life. It is just that. I live with it."

He pauses before adding softly: "Nobody could ever know the true horror, unless they had seen it with their own eyes."