https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-daring-polish-resistance-fighter-who-volunteered-to-be-sent-to-auschwitz-so-he-could-sabotage-the-nazi-death-camp-from-the-inside-180986559/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
“Pilecki’s life ended on a particularly bitter and darkly ironic note. As a man who had fought colonial and imperial lordship over Poland his entire life, he saw the Soviet occupation of his homeland after World War II as just another incarnation of foreign dictatorship. He went underground again, fighting until the Soviet-allied Polish secret police arrested him in May 1947. His own statesmen jailed and tortured him for over a year before executing him by firing squad on May 25, 1948. He was 47 years old.”
In September 1940, the Polish underground resistance fighter Witold Pilecki undertook a monumental act of bravery: He volunteered to allow the Nazi forces occupying Poland to arrest him, in the expectation that they would incarcerate him in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
At the time, the newly constructed Nazi facility in southern Poland hadn’t yet assumed its ultimate incarnation as Adolf Hitler’s seminal death camp. The internment center functioned more like a prison for convicted German criminals; a small number of Jews; and Polish oppositionists, including members of the Secret Polish Army, Pilecki’s outfit. Yet from its first days, Auschwitz bore a reputation for extreme brutality.
The Polish underground initially hoped that it could liberate Auschwitz from within the camp’s walls. The clandestine network selected Pilecki, a 39-year-old veteran and fervent Polish nationalist, to infiltrate Auschwitz, report on its operations and organize fellow prisoners with the object of overthrowing the German camp’s superintendents. Pilecki, the secret army’s chief of staff, carried out this Hail Mary mission over a period of two and a half years. Although the Polish freedom fighters couldn’t incapacitate the Nazis’ operation, Pilecki and his cohorts smuggled descriptive reports out of the facility as it morphed into Europe’s most heinous death factory, where more than 1.1 million people died, nearly one million of them Jews.
Over the course of 1942, Pilecki correctly grasped why the Nazis were enlarging the camp complex by adding gas chambers and crematoriums. He repeatedly urged the Polish exile government in London to convince the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force to bomb Auschwitz, even if it meant killing innocent victims in the camp, including himself. Pilecki’s reports provided some of the earliest evidence of the Nazi death camps and their function in what the Nazis labeled the “Final Solution,” or the extermination of Europe’s Jews, known since as the Holocaust.
Pilecki’s credentials made him a logical candidate for this harrowing job of subterfuge and sabotage. Born in 1901 to patriotic Polish Catholics living in the Russian Empire, the teenage Pilecki served as a scout for Polish self-defense units during World War I. After the global conflict ended in 1918, he fought in a cavalry unit in the Polish-Soviet War, a 1919 to 1921 conflict between Polish nationalist forces and the Soviet Red Army over territory in present-day Ukraine and Belarus. While serving as a reserve officer in the mid-1920s, he took over his family’s estate, and in 1931, he married elementary school teacher Maria Ostrowska. The couple had two children; Pilecki painted and wrote poetry in his free time.
But Hitler’s war machine shattered the family’s harmony. On September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, and two weeks later, the Soviets attacked from the east. Pilecki mobilized a reserve unit of local men he’d trained over the summer, but most of them were “peasants who had never seen action or fired a gun in anger,” writes journalist Jack Fairweather in The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz. In a little over a month, the Polish Army was defeated, and the country of Poland came under Nazi and Soviet occupation.
Pilecki, like thousands of other Polish soldiers and civilians, joined an underground opposition that battled the occupiers from forests, sewer systems and cellars, notes a permanent exhibition on Pilecki’s life at the Pilecki Institute in Berlin.
