In 1942, a small group of around 450 young Jewish men were separated from the nearly 23,000 Jews in the ghetto as part of a forced labor group for Daimler-Benz that had taken over a factory in Rzeszów to manufacture small airplane engines. In the summer of 1942, the rest of the Jews in the ghetto were forced into boxcars and sent to be murdered in the Belzec extermination camp. Lucjan worked in the factory that was renamed Reichshof by the Germans, until Daimler Benz evacuated the factory in July of 1944 as the Soviets drove into Poland.
The factory would be dismantled and moved to France. The Jewish labor prisoners were transported first to the Płaszów concentration camp, then to Wieliczka and Flossenbürg before they arrived to the tunnel factory in Urbès, near Colmar, in August 1944. As the Americans swept across France, the factory was bombed and the SS moved the remaining prisoners back to Germany and through the camps of Sachsenhausen, Watenstedt, Braunschweig, Ravensbrück, and Wöbbelin, where they were liberated by American soldiers on May 2, 1945.