This month marks the 77th anniversary of a World War II milestone few people know about. It’s the story of a Polish army captain named Witold Pilecki.
At the conclusion of World War I, for the first time since 1795, Poland was reconstituted as an independent nation, but it was immediately embroiled in war with Lenin’s Russia. Pilecki joined the fight against the Bolsheviks when he was 17, first on the front and then from behind enemy lines. For two years he fought gallantly and was twice awarded the prestigious Cross of Valor.
In August 1939, Hitler and Stalin secretly agreed to divide Poland between them. On September 1, the Nazis attacked the country from the west, and two weeks later, the Soviets invaded from the east. The world was at war again — and so was Pilecki.
An overwhelmed Warsaw surrendered on September 27, but Polish resistance never ceased. Together, Pilecki and Jan Włodarkiewicz cofounded the Secret Polish Army (Tajna Armia Polska) in early November. They and other elements of a growing underground movement carried out numerous raids against both Nazi and Soviet forces. In September 1940, Pilecki proposed a daring plan that in hindsight appears nearly unimaginable: he would arrange to be arrested in the hope that the Nazis, instead of executing him, might send him to the Auschwitz camp where he could gather information and form a resistance group from the inside.
In September 1940, Pilecki didn’t 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.
The Mystery of Auschwitz
In the early years of the war, little was known about the area near the town Germans called Auschwitz.
Poland was in a state of chaos. It was divided in half — Nazi Germany claiming one side, Soviet Russia on the other. The Polish resistance had gone underground.
He decided to infiltrate the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he could gather intelligence and organize a resistance movement within the camp. “I was haunted by a simple idea: to agitate the minds, to stir the mass to an action,” he wrote in a report in 1945.
“They didn’t realize the information from inside the camp was that vital,” says Ryszard Bugajski, a Polish filmmaker who directed the 2006 film The Death of Captain Pilecki.
Life as a Number
On Sept. 19, he bid his wife Maria and his two children goodbye and he inserted himself into a group of captives with false papers identifying him as “Tomasz Serafinski.” Along with 2,000 other prisoners, he was herded onto a train and taken to Auschwitz, arriving the night on Sept. 21. “From that moment we became mere numbers — I wore the number 4859.”
That was an early number for a camp that would — one year later — see numbers in the 15,000s.
The Auschwitz camp had been opened in June 1940. At the time of Pilecki’s arrival, it primarily held Polish resistance fighters and intellectuals, though there was also a significant numbers of Jews and Soviet POWs.
Alex Storozynski, president and executive director of the Kosciuszko Foundation, stated that one of the early signs of Auschwitz’s true purpose to Pilecki was the prisoners’ diet. “The food rations were calculated in such a way that people would live for six weeks,” Storozynski says.
Smuggling Out Word of the Horrors Within
Within a month, Pilecki was smuggling out intelligence reports detailing conditions inside the camp.
He was assigned to backbreaking work — 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.
“The underground army was completely in disbelief about the horrors,” Storozynski explains. “About ovens, about gas chambers, about injections to murder people — people didn’t believe him. They thought he was exaggerating.”
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.
For the next two and a half years, Pilecki slowly worked to feed his reports up the Polish chain of command to London.
He confirmed in 1941 that the Nazis were intent on exterminating Jews, and the following year his organization discovered the gas chambers. His reports reached Britain and the United States, serving as the most detailed source on the inner working of the concentration camps.
“And in London,” Storozynski says, “the Polish government in exile told the British and the Americans, ‘You need to do something. You need to bomb the train tracks going to these camps. Or we have all these Polish paratroopers — drop them inside the camp. Let them help these people break out.’ But the British and the Americans just wouldn’t do anything.”
Pilecki’s Escape
Eventually, after nearly three years, Pilecki reported, “further stay here might be too dangerous and difficult for me.”
Late on the night of April 26, Pilecki and two members of his organization took advantage of an off-camp assignment and escaped from the bakery where they were working.
The escapees made their way from Auschwitz to Warsaw, a journey of some 200 miles. There, Witold reestablished connections with the underground in time to assume a commanding role in the Warsaw Uprising, the largest single military offensive undertaken by any European resistance movement in World War II.
Warsaw was demolished, the rebellion was put down, and Pilecki found himself in a German POW camp for the remaining months of the war. If the Nazis had realized who he was, summary execution would surely have followed quickly.
A Story Revealed — At Last
There’s a reason the world has never heard the story of Witold Pilecki’s infiltration of Auschwitz. The communist regime in Poland censored any mention of his name in the public record — a ban that remained in place until the fall of the Berlin wall.
Germany’s surrender in May 1945 resulted in the immediate liberation of its prisoners. For Pilecki in particular, it meant a brief respite from conflict and confinement. Stationed in Italy as part of the 2nd Polish Corps, he wrote a personal account of his time at Auschwitz. But as the summer turned into fall, it was becoming apparent that the Soviets were not planning to leave Poland.
In October 1945, Pilecki accepted yet another undercover assignment — to go back to Poland and gather evidence of growing Soviet atrocities. This he did, marking him by the pro-Soviet Polish puppet regime as an enemy of the state.
In May 1947 — two years to the day after Nazi Germany capitulated — Witold Pilecki’s cover was blown. He was arrested and tortured for months before a sham public trial in May 1948, where he was found guilty of espionage and given a death sentence.
His last words before his execution on May 25 were,“Long live free Poland!” He was 47.
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