Władysław Kostrzyński had a good sense of German mentalities when he escaped from the Mannheim-Sandhofen concentration camp on the day before Christmas Eve in 1944. During the Warsaw Uprising, he had been captured in early September 1944 and separated from his wife and young son. He was then transported to Dachau and subsequently to Mannheim. The intense freedom of his escape ended shortly after Christmas. After being re-imprisoned in Bayreuth, he ended up in the Gestapo penal camp in Langenzenn, where he narrowly escaped execution due to the approaching front and was sent to the Flossenbürg concentration camp. There, he was liberated as a terminally ill patient and survived.