Cpt. Pilecki: Voluntary Prisoner of Auschwitz

Witold Pilecki was born in 1901 in Karelia, Russia, where his family had been deported by Tsarist Russian authorities after the suppression of Poland's January Uprising of 1863. In 1910, Pilecki moved with his family to Vilnius (now in Lithuania), where he completed education and joined the secret Scouts organization.

During World War I, in 1918, Pilecki joined the Polish Army and took part in the Polish-Soviet War of 1920. He fought as part of a cavalry unit defending Grodno (in present-day Belarus). Later he joined the 211th Uhlan Regiment and fought in the crucial Battle of Warsaw and took part in the liberation of Vilnius. He was twice awarded the Cross of Valor for gallantry.

Shortly before the outbreak of the World War II in 1939, Pilecki was mobilized as a cavalry-platoon commander. His unit took part in heavy fighting against the advancing Germans during the invasion of Poland and was partially destroyed. Pilecki's platoon withdrew southeast and was incorporated into the recently formed 41st Infantry Division. Pilecki and his men destroyed 7 German tanks, shot down an aircraft and destroyed further 2 on the ground.

On September 17, Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland pursuant to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Involved in more heavy fighting on two fronts, by September 22, Pilecki's division was disbanded, partially surrendering to the enemies. He returned to Warsaw with his commander.

In November 1939, the two men founded the Secret Polish Army (TAP), one of the first underground organizations in Poland. By 1940, TAP had approximately 8,000 men, some 20 machine guns and several anti-tank rifles. Later, the organization was incorporated into the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), the 3rd largest underground movement in Europe.

In 1940, Pilecki presented to his superiors a plan to enter German Auschwitz concentration camp at Oswiecim, gather intelligence on the camp from the inside, and organize inmate resistance. Until then, little had been known about the Germans' running of the camp, and it was thought to be more an internment camp or large prison rather than a death camp. His superiors approved the plan and provided him a false identity card.

In September 1940, he deliberately went out during a Warsaw street roundup, and was caught by the Germans along with some 2,000 innocent civilians. After two days of torture, he was sent to Auschwitz. Pilecki was tattooed on his forearm with the number 4859.

At Auschwitz, while working in various kommandos and surviving pneumonia, Pilecki began recruiting members for an underground resistance group that he organized. Soon he began sending information (via courier system of Polish Resistance) to Britain and the United States about what was going on inside the camp and confirming that the Nazis were seeking the extermination of the Jews. These reports were a principal source of intelligence on Auschwitz for the Western Allies.

By 1942, Pilecki's resistance group had learned of the existence of the gas chambers and began work on several plans to liberate Auschwitz, including one in which the RAF would bomb the walls or Polish Independent Parachute Brigade would fly in from Britain. In 1943, when Pilecki realized that the Allies did not have such plans, he escaped with two other prisoners. When he was assigned to a night shift at a camp bakery outside the fence, they overpowered a guard, cut the phone line and escaped on one night of April 1943, taking along documents stolen from the Germans.

[Estimation of numbers of deaths in Auschwitz]

Here I quote the number of people who died in Oswiecim. When I was leaving Oswiecim, I remembered a serial number 121 thousand and some. There were about 23 thousand of those alive, of such ones who had departed in transports or been released. About 97 thousand numbered prisoners died. It had nothing to do with the number of people, who had been gassed and burnt in masses, unrecorded. Basing on estimations done by those who worked close to that commando, over 2 million such people died. I quoted that number cautiously, not to overestimate; the daily quoted numbers should rather be discussed in detail. Colleagues, who were there and witnessed gassings of eight thousand people a day, quote the number of plus/minus five million people *.

* Now we know, that this number was exaggerated, but nevertheless an unthinkable number of 1.5 million of people was killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. Among them were 1.1 million Jews, 150 000 Poles, 23 000 Gypsies and 15 000 Soviet POWs

[Creation of women's camp. Gas chambers in operation. Massacre of Polish women.]

First women: prostitutes and criminals from German prisons were delivered to Oswiecim. to a part of the camp separated from us by a high wall and they were appointed an educational staff for women who were to be transported here soon, for honest women - "ordinary offenders". In Brzezinka, in already finished gas chambers, first mass gassings of people were started. On 19 March 1942, 120 women, Poles, were delivered. They smiled to prisoners who entered the camp in columns. After an inquiry, or perhaps after some special treatment which nobody was able to specify, in the evening of that day, some corpses cut into pieces, heads, hands, breasts cut off, mutilated dead bodies, were carried by carts to the crematorium.

[Transports of Jews from all over Europe]

Who was going just into the jaws of death, and why? Jews were going from Bohemia, France, the Netherlands and other countries of Europe. They went alone, unescorted, and only about ten to twenty kilometres from Oswiecim the vans were guarded, and they were delivered to a side-track, to Brzezinka. Why did they go? I had an opportunity to talk to Jews of France several times and one time with a transport from Poland, which was rare to be met here. It was a transport of Jews from Bialystok and Grodno. From what they told me unanimously it might be concluded, that they were arriving due to official announcements in various cities and states under German rule, from which it appeared that only those Jews would live on, who would go to work in the Third Reich. So they went to work in the Third Reich. All the more, they were encouraged by letters written by Jews from Oswiecim and perhaps from other camps, that they worked in good conditions and did well.
They had the right to take a hand luggage - what they were able to carry by themselves. So some of them took two suitcases, in which they tried to carry all their property, having sold their immovables and movables and having purchased some small and valuable things, for instance gold, gold dollars... Railway transports, which were carrying about one thousand people a day, ended their route in the side-track. Trains were brought to platforms and their content was unloaded. Interesting, what thoughts were in the heads of SS-men? There were many women and children in the vans. Sometimes, there were children in cradles. Here all of them were to end their lives collectively.
They were carried like a herd of animals to be slaughtered...

Several days after his escape, he made contact with the Home Army units. In August 1943, Pilecki reached Warsaw and joined the Home Army's intelligence department. Pilecki's detailed report (Raport Witolda-"Witold's Report") was sent to London and he was promoted to Captain.

When the Warsaw Uprising broke out on August 1, 1944, Pilecki volunteered. At first, he fought in the northern city center without revealing his actual rank, as a simple private. Later, as many officers fell, he disclosed his true identity and accepted command. On the capitulation of the uprising, Pilecki hid some weapons in a private apartment and went into captivity. He spent the rest of the war in German prisoner-of-war camps

In July 1945, Pilecki was liberated from the POW camp and returned to Poland in October 1945, where he proceeded to organize his intelligence network. In April 1947, he began collecting evidence on Soviet atrocities and on the prosecution of Poles (mostly members of the Home Army) and their executions or imprisonment in Soviet gulags.

In May 1947 he was arrested by the communist security service (UB). Prior to trial, he was repeatedly tortured revealing no sensitive information. In March 1948, a show trial took place. Testimony against him was presented by a future Polish prime minister, Jozef Cyrankiewicz, himself an Auschwitz survivor. Pilecki was accused of illegal crossing of the borders, use of forged documents, not enlisting with the military, carrying illegal arms, espionage for the Polish Government-in-Exile and preparing an assassination on several officials from the Ministry of Public Security of Poland. Pilecki denied the assassination charges, as well as espionage (although he admitted to passing information to the II Polish Corps of whom he considered himself an officer and thus claimed that he was not breaking any laws); he pleaded guilty to the other charges. On May 15, with three of his comrades, he was sentenced to death. Ten days later, on May 25, 1948, he was executed in Warsaw by shooting.

Pilecki's conviction was part of a prosecution of Home Army members and others connected with the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. In 2003, his prosecutor and several others involved in the trial were charged with complicity in Pilecki's murder. Cyrankiewicz escaped similar proceedings, having died. After Poland regained its independence, Witold Pilecki and all others sentenced in the staged trial were rehabilitated. In 1995, he received posthumously the Order of Polonia Restituta. In 2006, he received the Order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish decoration.

His place of burial has never been found. He is thought to have been buried in an unmarked grave in a garbage dump.

The Doomed Soldiers is a name applied to Polish resistance movements, formed in the later stages of WW2 and afterwards. Created by former members of the Polish resistance, these organizations continued the fight against the communist regime of Poland well into the 1950s. Many of the doomed soldiers was prosecuted and unfairly judged - very often with death penalty, like Cpt. Witold Pilecki was, or simply killed in a battle.