BOULDER, Colo.—When the Fourmile Fire raced down the hill near Walter Plywaski’s home in the Sugarloaf area last week, swallowing it in flames and leaving nothing but rubble and a brick chimney in its wake, Plywaski had a different perspective of the tragedy than his neighbors.
“I have lost more before,” said the 81-year-old Holocaust survivor, who came to the United States in 1947 as a stowaway pretending to be an American reporter.
“It’s almost like water off a duck’s back when you compare it to the camps and the Holocaust,” Plywaski said Tuesday while sitting on the back porch of a friend’s home, where he’s staying for an undermined amount of time. “This pales in comparison.”
Still, Plywaski said, when he walked through the ashes of the home where he and his wife raised their three daughters Sunday, he lamented the lost memories of the place he had lived since 1965.
Original photos of his family before World War II that he managed to recover after returning to Europe years later; a traditional Polish kilim—like a wool blanket—that his family used to keep their bedding warm on the stove; and dozens of slides of his children and adventures.
“This gives an entirely different meaning to the phrase, ‘I’m burned up,'” said Plywaski, who managed to take with him some clothes, a few framed pictures and his computer, which holds much of the material he plans to use for an autobiography.
“I’m feeling like patting myself on the back for grabbing the computer,” he said, showing off the old pictures of his childhood, father and other relatives that he managed to download to his hard drive before the fire.
He also had photos on his desktop from a “Polish party” at his house weeks ago that showed off the home’s large deck and expansive views.
“Now it’s all rubble,” he said. “Puddles of melted glass and melted aluminum.”
The fire that started Sept. 6 scorched 10 square miles in the foothills west of Boulder and destroyed at least 166 homes. The last of the thousands of people driven from their homes were allowed to return Wednesday.
Plywaski, who said he feared for his life when he saw flames so close to his home last week, already was living on borrowed time after living through Auschwitz and other work camps during the Holocaust. He said he was forced in 1944 to march into the extermination camp in Poland, where his mother was gassed.
At age 15, Plywaski said, he was in the “holding pen for the gas chamber” for what seemed like “three lifetimes.”
“In Auschwitz, two weeks was a lifetime,” he said.
He found a way out by volunteering for a work camp elsewhere, although he said that was risky because German officials often promised to transport workers and instead took them to be gassed. At a camp in Dachau, Germany, he said, his father was beaten to death by a camp commandant with a shovel.
It wasn’t until he was captured by Americans, given a U.S. Army uniform and made to be an “U.S. Army mascot” that Plywaski felt he would survive the war.
“I was the safest guy in Germany in that uniform,” he said.
Plywaski made it to the United States in 1947 and later moved to Boulder because, “I like mountains, I like nature, I like skiing, I used to climb.” He worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration before retiring.
Plywaski was reading the New York Times online Monday afternoon when he received a reverse 911 call warning him about the fast-moving fire and telling him to evacuate.
“I thought, ‘maybe it wouldn’t get to me,’ but I saw the tongues of flames over the ridge, and I figured, ‘I better get the hell out,'” he said.
Plywaski said he tried to corral his two cats but they wouldn’t cooperate and he had to leave them. When he went back days later, Plywaski said, he found small bones that likely were his pets.
With few possessions, Plywaski said, he’s planning to stay with his friend, Margaret Poyton, in Boulder for as long as he needs. He said he’s been in a similar situation before, and he isn’t worried.
“When you leave a concentration camp, you are born again with nothing,” he said. “Considering I am alive and considering I was supposed to die in Auschwitz in 1944, I still feel pretty good, and I still have plans and I still have life and I still have joy.”
