The courage within
A Polish soldier volunteered to be incarcerated at Auschwitz so he could report on the Nazis’ activities inside the death camp.
A Polish soldier volunteered to be incarcerated at Auschwitz so he could report on the Nazis’ activities inside the death camp.
In the spring of 1940, German SS chief Heinrich Himmler was investigating suitable sites to establish extermination camps. In these locations, enemies and undesirables of the Third Reich could be put to death without unnecessary distractions or unwelcome scrutiny. One site he chose was an ugly little town of some 12,000 people in Upper Silesia in German-occupied Poland. It was malariaridden and poorly industrialised and few people went there. But the town of Auschwitz was perfect. The Germans took over 20 decrepit army barracks and started building an extermination camp. Two miles west of Auschwitz town were some parallel blocks of huts at Birkenau. These would be part of the Auschwitz slaughter factory. In this area of 15 square miles (39sq km), from the middle of 1940 to January 1945, more than three million people would be put to death.
In September 1940, a group of 1800 men picked up in Warsaw in a routine mass round-up by the Germans were being transported to Auschwitz. Denied food and water during the journey, they had a brutal entry into the camp. Hauled from the back of lorries under blinding lights, kicked and rifle-butted into line by SS men, snarled at by savage dogs, the new arrivals were shown how cheap life was at Auschwitz.
One of them later wrote: “On the way, one of us was told to run to a post at the side of the road; he was followed by a burst of automatic weapons fire and mown down. Ten men were then dragged out of the ranks at random and shot with pistols as ‘collective responsibility’ for the ‘escape’, which the SS themselves had staged. All 11 of them were then dragged by leg straps. The dogs were teased with the bloody corpses and set on them. All this to the accompaniment of laughter and joking.
“We approached a gate in a wire fence over which could be seen the sign ‘Arbeit macht frei’ [Work makes you free]. It was only later that we learnt to understand it properly.”
VOLUNTARILY INCARCERATED
The writer of this passage was a 39-year-old Polish cavalry officer named Witold Pilecki. He had made the astounding choice to voluntarily be incarcerated at Auschwitz so that he could report on its activities to the Polish Home Army – Poland’s anti-Nazi underground movement. It was an incredibly risky mission, one that Pilecki had suggested. It needed a man of remarkable courage to attempt it.
Witold Pilecki’s life was dominated by war and conflict. He was born in 1901 at Olonets, Karelia – his family had been forcibly resettled to this region of Tsarist Russia as punishment for his grandfather’s involvement in the Polish uprising of 1863. That grandfather, Józef Pilecki, also spent seven years in Siberian exile for this “crime”. In 1910, the family moved to the ethnically Polish city of Wilno, now Vilnius, in Lithuania. Here, Witold finished school and joined the secret Polish Scouts movement.
This movement at first resisted the Bolshevik invasion of Wilno and then carried out partisan resistance behind the lines once the Bolsheviks captured the city. After Poland’s re-emergence as a nation state, Witold Pilecki immediately joined the newly formed national army and took an active part in the Polish-Soviet War of 191921. He fought in the Kiev offensive and in the critical battle of Warsaw. Although still in his teens, Pilecki was twice decorated with Poland’s Cross of Valour. The Polish-Soviet War ended with the Peace of Riga. The Bolsheviks were defeated in this conflict and gallant Poland prevented their advance to Eastern Europe for a quarter of a century.
During the inter-war years, Pilecki lived a normal life. He married in 1931 and had two children. He worked on the family farm, painted, wrote poetry and was active in charity work. He also remained active in Poland’s army reserve, serving as a junior
“On the way, one of us was told to run to a post at the side of the road; he was followed by a burst of automatic weapons fire and mown down. “
1. Witold Pilecki in 1940. 2. A busy meat market in Wilno, the Lithuanian town Pilecki grew up in, in 1918. 3. Vladimir Lenin, whose invading Bolsheviks faced Pilecki’s resistance fighters in Wilno. 4. The entrance to Auschwitz, adorned by the sign “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes you free). 5. Camp photos of Pilecki. 6. Polish Home Army soldiers fighting the Germans in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. 7. Resistance fighters rest in a church during the Warsaw Uprising.