In September of 1940, a Polish army captain named Witold Pilecki, did what no one could imagine, he sneaked into the Auschwitz concentration camp. Pilecki was a committed Christian and Polish patriot who couldn\u2019t sit by and watch what was going on in there. His goal was to gather information on the horrible things happening inside the barbed wire, but knew he could only do that if he was inside.<\/p>\n
He devised a daring plan that his superiors approved. They provided Pilecki with a false identity card that bore a Jewish name, and then Pilecki allowed himself to be arrested by the Nazis during a routine street roundup in Warsaw. He was sent to Auschwitz and given inmate number 4859. Pilecki, who had a wife and two children, knew he was saying goodbye to all that he knew and loved on earth, aware that he very well might not survive. Inside the camp he was treated like every other prisoner; he was beaten, harassed and threatened with death.<\/p>\n
From inside he began to carry out his mission, organizing inmates into resistance units, boosting morale and documenting war crimes. Pilecki had couriers who smuggled out detailed reports on the atrocities he saw firsthand. He helped organize a secret radio station using scrap parts. His information provided Western allies with key intelligence information about Auschwitz.<\/p>\n
In the spring of 1943, Pilecki joined the camp bakery where he overpowered a guard and escaped. From the outside he completed his report which estimated that some 2 million persons had died in the camp. When his eyewitness the reports reached London, officials thought he was exaggerating.<\/p>\n
This is an amazing story about a dedicated and selfless man. One Jewish writer summarized Pilecki\u2019s life this way: “Once he set his mind to the good, he never wavered, never stopped. He crossed the great human divide that separates knowing the right thing from doing the right thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
Rob Eshman, \u201cThe Man Who Snuck into Auschwitz,\u201d JewishJournal.com,12-5-12; Captain Witold Pilecki, The Auschwitz Volunteer , A. Polonica, 2012<\/p>\n
=================
\nVersion from NPR:<\/p>\n
\u201cMeet the Man Who Sneaked Into Auschwitz,\u201d NPR staff, September 18, 2010
\n< http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=129956107 ><\/p>\n
This weekend [September 2010] marks the 70th anniversary of a World War II milestone few people have heard before. It\u2019s the story of a Polish army captain named Witold Pilecki.<\/p>\n
In September 1940, Pilecki didn\u2019t know exactly what was going on in Auschwitz, but he knew someone had to find out. He would spend two and a half years in the prison camp, smuggling out word of the methods of execution and interrogation. He would eventually escape and author the first intelligence report on the camp.<\/p>\n
The Mystery of Auschwitz<\/p>\n
In the early years of the war, little was known about the area near the town Germans called Auschwitz.<\/p>\n
Poland was in a state of chaos. It was divided in half \u2014 Nazi Germany claiming one side, Soviet Russia on the other. The Polish resistance had gone underground.<\/p>\n
Pilecki wanted to infiltrate the Auschwitz camp, but he had difficulty getting commanders to sign off on the mission. At the time, it was thought of as POW camp.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey didn\u2019t realize the information from inside the camp was that vital,\u201d says Ryszard Bugajski, a Polish filmmaker who directed the 2006 film The Death of Captain Pilecki.<\/p>\n
Pilecki was eventually cleared to insert himself into a street round-up of Poles in Warsaw on Sept. 19, 1940. Upon arrival, he learned Auschwitz was far from anything the Resistance had imagined.<\/p>\n
Life As A Number<\/p>\n
\u201cTogether with a hundred other people, I at least reached the bathroom,\u201d Pilecki\u2019s Auschwitz report reads. \u201cHere we gave everything away into bags, to which respective numbers were tied. Here our hair of head and body were cut off, and we were slightly sprinkled by cold water. I got a blow in my jaw with a heavy rod. I spat out my two teeth. Bleeding began. From that moment we became mere numbers \u2014 I wore the number 4859.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was a small and early number for a camp that would \u2014 one year later \u2014 see numbers in the 15,000s.<\/p>\n
Alex Storozynski, president and executive director of the Kosciuszko Foundation, tells NPR\u2019s Mike Pesca that one of the early signs of Auschwitz\u2019s true purpose to Pilecki was the prisoners\u2019 diet. \u201cThe food rations were calculated in such a way that people would live for six weeks,\u201d Storozynski says.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s Pilecki\u2019s description of what a German officer told him: \u201c \u2018Whoever will live longer \u2014 it means he steals. You will be placed in a special commando, where you will live short.\u2019 This was aimed to cause as quick a mental breakdown as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smuggling Out Word of the Horrors Within<\/p>\n
Pilecki was assigned to backbreaking work \u2014 carrying rocks in a wheelbarrow. But he also managed to gather intelligence on the camp and smuggle messages out with prisoners who escaped. SS soldiers assigned Poles to take their laundry into town, and sometimes messages could be smuggled along with the dirty clothes to be passed to the underground Polish army.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe underground army was completely in disbelief about the horrors,\u201d Storozynski explains. \u201cAbout ovens, about gas chambers, about injections to murder people \u2014 people didn\u2019t believe him. They thought he was exaggerating.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pilecki also hoped to organize an attack and mass escape from the camp. But no order could be procured for such a plan from Polish high command.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were waiting for an order, as we understood that without such one \u2014 although it would be a beautiful firework and unexpected for the world and for Poland \u2014 we could not agree to do that,\u201d Pilecki wrote.<\/p>\n
For the next two-and-a-half years, Pilecki slowly worked to feed his reports up the Polish chain of command to London.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd in London,\u201d Storozynski says, \u201cthe Polish government in exile told the British and the Americans, \u2018You need to do something. You need to bomb the train tracks going to these camps. Or we have all these Polish paratroopers \u2014 drop them inside the camp. Let them help these people break out.\u2019 But the British and the Americans just wouldn\u2019t do anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pilecki\u2019s Escape<\/p>\n
Eventually, after nearly three years, Pilecki reported, \u201cfurther stay here might be too dangerous and difficult for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
He planned an escape through a poorly secured back door in a bakery, where he\u2019d managed to get a job. With a few other inmates, he ran into the night.<\/p>\n
\u201cShots were fired behind us,\u201d he wrote. \u201cHow fast we were running, it is hard to describe. We were tearing the air into rags by quick movements of our hands.\u201d<\/p>\n
After his escape, Pilecki continued to fight in the underground. But after the war, the Germans were replaced by a new occupying regime \u2014 the Soviets. Pilecki was again asked to gather intelligence, this time on the ways in which the communists were establishing themselves in Poland.<\/p>\n
Filmmaker Bugajski explains, \u201cHe was actually captured by the communists, he was accused of espionage, and he was shot.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Story Revealed \u2014 At Last<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a reason many Americans have never heard the story of Witold Pilecki\u2019s infiltration of Auschwitz. The communist regime in Poland censored any mention of his name in the public record \u2014 a ban that remained in place until the fall of the Berlin wall.<\/p>\n
Only since then have documents emerged that reveal his story \u2014 and that allowed Bugajski to accurately portray it in his film.<\/p>\n
That film ends with an epilogue, as the actor who plays Pilecki, Marek Probosz, walks outside the same prison where Pilecki was executed.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo our surprise, we see that this is free Poland,\u201d Probosz explains. \u201cThat you can talk about Pilecki, and no one is going to spit in your face or stab you with a knife.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today there is a street in Warsaw named after Pilecki. A square might be named after him, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving a beautiful wife and two kids he loved dearly, he decided to leave them behind and go to Auschwitz.\u201d Probosz says. \u201cHuman beings were the most precious thing for Pilecki, and especially those who were oppressed. He would do anything to liberate them, to help them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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