There is no more desperate attempt at communication than to stuff a message in a bottle. Sometimes, though, these letters do arrive – this one was 65 years late, and not from a desert island but from the horrors of Auschwitz.

Building workers at a school in southern Poland who found a brown bottle behind masonry discovered it was a laconic call for help from seven inmates – a Frenchman and six Poles. Now, thanks to some internet research, the Frenchman, Albert Veissid, has been tracked down and the hunt is on for two of the Poles who, historians believe, survived the Holocaust. They were Karol Czekalski and Waclaw Sobczak.

“They were young people who were trying to leave some trace of their existence behind them,“ said Jaroslaw Mensfelt, spokesman for the museum at the former Nazi camp near Cracow, southern Poland.

The signatories of the letter – scrawled with a pencil on what appears to be a scrap of paper from a cement sack – had been sent outside the camp to reinforce the walls of an SS warehouse so that it could be used as an air raid shelter.

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Allied bombing had begun in the region in the summer. According to the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, the note reads in full: “KL Auschwitz 20.IX.44 AA shelter for T.W.L crew. Built by prisoners: No 121313 Jankowiak Bronislaw from Poznan, 130208 Dubla Stanislaw from Laskowice, Tarnow district, 131491 Jasik Jan from Radom neighbourhood, 145664 Sobczak Waclaw from Konin neighbourhood, 151090 Czekalski Karol from Lodz, 157582 Bialobrzeski Waldemar from Ostro-leka, 12063 Veissid Albert from Lyon (France). All 18-20 years old.”

AA stands for anti-aircraft, TWL for Truppen Wirtschafts Lager, which means army supply depot.

Mr Veissid was tracked down by a Pole who, having read his camp details, managed to find his granddaughter on Facebook. The Frenchman was 85 this week and lives with his granddaughter near Marseilles. Mr Veissid said that he could not remember the bottle but confirmed that he must be the man mentioned on the paper. “It is absolutely my name on the message and my registration number: 12063. I can’t forget that number because it’s on my arm.”

Finding the Polish survivors may be more complicated. Mr Czekalski wrote letters to the research team at the museum in the 1960s trying to find out more information about his cousins; his whole family died in the camp. But there has been no contact for the past four decades.

It is believed that Mr Sobczak briefly belonged to an Auschwitz survivors’ association after the war.

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