Witold Pilecki

Witold Pilecki, a Polish cavalry officer and reserve lieutenant of the Polish army, volunteered in summer 1940 to be arrested in a German street round-up in Warsaw and sent to Auschwitz to gather intelligence on the camp from inside. He was forty years old. He had a wife, two children and a small farm in eastern Poland. He had been a member of the Polish underground, the Tajna Armia Polska, since the German occupation began. The order to volunteer for Auschwitz was, in the strict sense, his own. The mission was approved by the Polish Home Army command. He was issued false papers in the name of Tomasz Serafinski, walked into a German street sweep on Aleja Wojska Polskiego in Warsaw on 19 September 1940, allowed himself to be arrested, and was on the second mass transport to Auschwitz on the same day. He spent two years and seven months inside the camp.

Pilecki used the time to build the largest underground organisation inside Auschwitz, the Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, the Union of Military Organisation, which by the time of his escape in spring 1943 numbered around one thousand prisoners across the camp’s various labour details and prisoner barracks. The organisation gathered information on camp operations, organised food and medicine for the sickest prisoners, planned for an armed uprising in the event of a Soviet or Allied advance, and, most consequentially, transmitted regular intelligence reports to the Polish Home Army command in Warsaw and from there to the Polish government-in-exile in London. The reports went out by courier, sometimes by escaped prisoners, sometimes by Polish civilian workers who had access to the camp’s industrial sites, sometimes by German postcards smuggled out and overwritten in invisible ink. The reports of October 1941 onwards described the early gas chamber experiments at Block 11, the construction of the new gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau, the massive influx of Soviet prisoners of war who were murdered at the camp by gas and starvation, and from spring 1942 the killing programme being run against the Jews of Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Greece. The Pilecki reports are the earliest detailed eyewitness reports of the Auschwitz operation to reach the West. They are now held in the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust archive in London.

The Polish government-in-exile passed the reports to the British and American governments. The Allied response was effectively no response: the British government circulated the reports in summer 1942 to a small group of senior officials, decided that bombing the camp was not feasible, and declined to publicise the information on the grounds that it would not change the outcome of the war and might be regarded as Polish propaganda. The Pilecki reports thus reached London but did not reach the wider Allied public until after the war. Pilecki, working inside the camp, did not know this. He continued to send reports until his escape.

Pilecki escaped on the night of 26, 27 April 1943 with two fellow prisoners, Jan Redzej and Edward Ciesielski. The three men had been assigned to the camp bakery on the outskirts of the camp, used the prisoner work key to leave the bakery building before dawn, cut the perimeter fence, and walked away across the Vistula. Pilecki rejoined the Polish Home Army in Warsaw in summer 1943 and wrote a report on the camp running to about one hundred and fifty pages, since published in English as The Auschwitz Volunteer. He took part in the Warsaw Uprising of August, September 1944, was captured by the Germans, and was held at the Murnau prisoner of war camp until liberation by American forces in May 1945. He returned to Warsaw in late 1945 to work for the Polish anti-communist underground, the II Korpus, gathering intelligence on the new Soviet-aligned government and on the deportations of Polish Home Army veterans to the Soviet Union.

The Polish communist authorities arrested him in May 1947. He was tortured at the Mokotow prison in Warsaw, tried in a closed proceeding in March 1948, convicted of espionage on behalf of the Polish government-in-exile, and sentenced to death. The death sentence was carried out at the Mokotow prison on 25 May 1948 by a single shot to the back of the head. His grave is still unknown; he was buried in a mass grave somewhere in the prison’s Powaązki cemetery section reserved for executed political prisoners. The Polish state during the communist period suppressed his name and his reports. The case was rehabilitated only after 1989. The Polish president Lech Kaczyński awarded Pilecki the Order of the White Eagle posthumously in 2006. The British and American governments declassified their wartime files on the Pilecki reports in stages between the 1990s and the 2010s. The case is now the subject of substantial historical literature in Polish and a smaller body of work in English.

Yad Vashem has not named Pilecki Righteous Among the Nations because the title is reserved for non-Jews who saved Jews from death; Pilecki’s primary act, while it included intelligence on the killing of Jews and the building of the underground organisation that distributed food and medicine to the sickest Jewish prisoners, was Polish national resistance against the German occupation rather than rescue in the technical Yad Vashem sense. The case is included on this site because the consequence of Pilecki’s reports, which began in 1941, was that the British, American and Polish governments knew about the Auschwitz killing programme from the moment it started, and because the moral weight of his life is, on any honest reckoning, in the same category as the named rescuers.

See also

Sources

  • Witold Pilecki, The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery, translated by Jarek Garlinski, Aquila Polonica, 2012
  • Jack Fairweather, The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz, Custom House, 2019
  • Adam Cyra, Ochotnik do Auschwitz: Witold Pilecki 1901, 1948, Oświęcim, 2000
  • Polish Underground Movement Study Trust archive, London, Pilecki reports
  • Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej), Warsaw, files on the trial of 1948
  • Norman Davies, Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw, Macmillan, 2003