For a long time, his name was taboo. But over the years, he began to be remembered as he remembers heroes.
This is Witold Pilecki, a Polish army officer who in 1940, when his country had just been occupied by troops from Nazi Germany, volunteered to be incarcerated in the Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland.
His mission was to obtain information about the functioning of the site and create a network of internal resistance.
He was imprisoned there for two and a half years, during which he suffered the very atrocities committed in Auschwitz, one of the greatest symbols of the Nazi genocide in World War II (1939-45), in which more than 1 million people were killed, most of them Jews.
This is your story.
Who was Witold Pilecki
Born in Oloniec, in northern Russia, in 1901, Pilecki was one of the soldiers with whom Poland tried to fight the invasion led by Adolf Hitler in 1939.
According to historian Jaroslaw Wróblenski, despite the notorious superiority of the Nazi war machine, “Pilecki wanted to fight, and in September 1939 he thought Poland would defeat the Germans in just a few weeks.”
After Germany’s rapid annexation of Poland, the Germans began mass arrests among the local population, with special attention to capturing the Polish military who had fought them on the battlefield.
It was then that the Auschwitz concentration camp was created. Its purpose and functioning were not well known at first, so the fledgling Polish resistance network against the occupation decided it was a good idea to infiltrate some of its members.
Active in the resistance, Pilecki volunteered.
His nephew, Andrzej Marek Ostrowski, was a boy at the time, but he remembers what happened. “After the 1939 military campaign Pilecki returned to Warsaw and one of the few places he could stay was my mother’s apartment.”
“There were meetings there to conspire against the Nazis and there were rumors that a large camp was being organized near Oswiecim,” a place the Nazis called Auschwitz.
When he learned that one of the Nazis’ usual attacks was targeting his sister’s apartment, Pilecki made a point of being present when they came to capture him.
“Early in the morning, the building’s caretaker, Jan Kilianski, came running to our door and offered to shelter him in a hiding place they had in the basement, but my uncle told him that this time he wouldn’t use it.” , remembers Ostrowski.
“My uncle packed up and got dressed. There was a knock at the door and it was a group of soldiers, some in civilian clothes. They asked if there were any men in the house. I was in my bed and my teddy bear was on the floor. My uncle got me he handed it over and kissed me on the forehead. As he passed my mother he said, ‘Let the appropriate person know I carried out the order.’ Then we realized it had been planned.”
Resistance at Auschwitz
Stuck in Auschwitz, Pilecki soon began to receive harsh treatment there.
“At first he said that his teeth were broken because the Germans wanted him to carry the prison number plate in his mouth and he refused,” says historian Wróblewski. “They then beat him with a cane and tortured him.”
His initial objective of creating a network of resistance came up against the reality of the countryside, where not everything was solidarity among prisoners and sometimes the struggle for survival generated conflicts.
Still, “even in that hell he created a military structure of about 500 people,” says Wróblewski.
Members of the network worked in different departments and areas of the camp and sought to obtain intelligence information that they could share with the resistance outside the extermination camp.
Pilecki sought to spread his allies over different areas to get a general idea. He knew firsthand the harsh conditions of life there, but he did not know, for example, how many prisoners were exactly there, so he found the information sent to him by his clandestine network colleagues working in the SS offices (police) very useful. Nazi).
For nearly three years, Pilecki sent reports in which he gave an account of how Auschwitz went from being a detention center primarily for Polish prisoners of war to becoming a major extermination site for Jews across Europe.
“He describes what Auschwitz was like from the inside and sends this information for the world to react, but the world has remained silent,” sums up Wróblenski.
After his pleas for the camp to be attacked were repeatedly ignored, Pilecki decided to flee along with two fellow resistance fighters.
Escape from Auschwitz and circumvent its surveillance measures was considered a mission impossible, but Pilecki and his two fleeing companions managed to get assigned as workers in the camp’s bakery, which lay outside the security perimeter. Once there, at dusk, they deactivated the alarm wires, opened the heavy metal door, and escaped.
back to resistance
Outside Auschwitz, Pilecki returned to the fight against the Nazi occupation and participated in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, with which the resistance tried to recover the Polish capital taken by the Nazis.
“His first mission was to eliminate German snipers who, often in civilian clothes, fired at members of the resistance,” recalls his nephew Andrzej.
The attempt failed, and Pilecki was again arrested by the Nazis, who imprisoned him in a POW camp.
American troops released him the following year, when Hitler’s final defeat already seemed inevitable.
a new enemy
But the liberation did not mean the end of the struggles of Pilecki, who at the end of the war, embarked on the fight against the communist government that installed itself in his country under the protection of Josef Stalin.
In 1947, Polish authorities arrested him. After a trial that Wroblewski describes as “brutal”, he was sentenced to death.
Young Krzysztof Krosior, Pilecki’s great-great-grandson, speaks of his demise: “My great-great-grandmother remembered very clearly that one day, when she went to take things to prison, they told her he was no longer there. that they had taken him to a mine in Siberia or elsewhere and one day he would show up again.”
In 1990, when the Cold War was ending and communism was collapsing across Eastern Europe, an official document confirmed the worst fears. Pilecki was shot without the family being informed.
Krosior says that for many years his widow couldn’t even talk about him. “In the communist era, my great-great-grandfather had to be forgotten.”
.
