Beatrice Allen and Yulia Yablonskikh
Have you ever heard of Witold Pilecki (pronounced peh-let-skee) and the brave role he played in WW2? Over the years his amazing story has been forgotten - his own children were told he was a traitor and enemy of the state. However, Pilecki should be remembered and honoured for his courage.
It all started when Poland was invaded by the Nazi forces in 1939. The German forces broke through Polish defences along the border and quickly advanced on Warsaw, the capital of Poland. The attack was known as a ‘blitzkrieg’ - a sneak attack. This surprise led to the fall of Poland, in only 35 days. Historians estimate that about 5.5 million Polish people died under the Nazi occupation of Poland. Half of this staggering number were Jewish Poles.
In 1940 Pilecki volunteered himself to be deliberately captured in a street roundup of Jews and taken to Auschwitz, where he would find out what really happened in the camp. At the time, the Secret Polish Army resistance movement wouldn’t sign off on the mission and they suspected that Auschwitz was simply a POW (Prisoner of War) camp. Eventually, he was cleared and successfully infiltrated the concentration camp. Upon arrival, Pilecki realised that Auschwitz was far from what the Resistance had imagined. At Auschwitz he organised a resistance movement that eventually involved hundreds of prisoners. He secretly drew up reports documenting the atrocities he witnessed at the German camp. These reports were smuggled out of Auschwitz and shared with the Allies. One of the early signs of Auschwitz’s true nature was the food. The rations were carefully calculated so that people would only live for six weeks. Those that were willing to steal to live would be placed in a special commando, where they would die soon. It was designed to cause as quick a mental breakdown as possible.
Pilecki was assigned back breaking work, whilst all the time gathering intelligence on the camp. The messages were smuggled out with prisoners who escaped. Sometimes messages could be sneaked out with dirty laundry that SS soldiers assigned Poles to take into town. The underground army was horrified by the information and thought Witold Pilecki was exaggerating - they did not believe him. Ovens, gas chambers and injections to murder people - it all sounded brutally fantastical. Along with sending bulletins that exposed the secrets of Auschwitz, Pilecki wanted to organise a mass attack and mass escape from the camp. However, no order could be procured for such a plan from the 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. In London, the Polish government in exile told the British and American allies to do something, bomb the tracks or help break the inmates out. But they did nothing.
After three years, Pilecki escaped as he realised that staying any longer might be dangerous. He escaped with a few other inmates through the poorly secured back door of the bakery he worked at. After his escape, Pilecki continued to fight in the underground army. He fought in the Warsaw uprising of 1944 but was interned in a German prisoner of war camp. When Poland was taken over by the Soviets he returned back to the country, in 1945, to inform the exiled Polish government on the situation. In 1947 he was arrested by the secret police and was executed in 1948. Before his death, Witold Pilecki was subjected to torture and a show trial, which is a public trial that only serves as an warning to others because the verdict has already been determined. According to a Polish newspaper, as he was led to his death, he said, “I’ve been trying to live my life so that in the hour of my death I would rather feel joy than fear.”
The Communist regime in Poland censored any mention of Witold Pilecki - a brave hero - in the public record, a ban that remained in place until the 1990s. Only since then have documents emerged that reveal this man’s incredible legacy. So spread the word of this underappreciated idol and let the world know of his tale.
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