“As we marched in column down the grey road towards the tannery, kicking up clouds of dust, we saw the beautiful red light of the sunrise glistening on the white blossoms of the orchards and the trees by the roadside, or met young couples out for a walk on the way back, breathing in the same spring, or women calmly pushing their prams with their children in front of them – then a thought would wake up and echo uneasily through the brain, curving around, stubbornly searching for an answer to an unsolvable question: are we all .. people?” Two and a half years of life in Auschwitz concentration camp took its toll, but the strength of the Polish resistance fighter Witold Pilecki was almost unbreakable. Who else would have voluntarily gone to Auschwitz to gather valuable information about its workings, and even successfully escaped from it?
“I have to admit that, for the first time, I felt that I no longer had the strength to continue fighting, to fight at all. I was in a dangerous mental state. To doubt the meaning of the struggle is to break down. When I noticed this, I woke up. I was again clutching the lice on my neck and legs,” he wrote in his third and longest account of his Auschwitz experience, which he had to prepare for the Polish government in exile to convince the Allies of the existence of the Holocaust.
He should have just stated the facts, but he couldn’t. “We were not made of wood,” wrote camp inmate number 4859, who watched at close quarters as Auschwitz was transformed from a camp for first Polish and then Russian prisoners into a death factory for the extermination of Jews.
39 years old in September 1940, when he decided to let the Germans arrest him, the fight for Poland’s independence had been in his veins for a long time, and perhaps it was in his genes. His grandfather and his family had been deported to Siberia for resisting the then Russian Empire, and Witold first picked up a rifle when he was just 17 years old, when the Russians had to be forcibly expelled from Poland’s eastern borders after the end of the First World War.
For Poles, the First World War ended only on paper. The Treaty of Versailles restored their independence after 123 years, but both the Germans and the Russians felt it was a gross injustice. They described Poland as a “Versailles punk” and intended to destroy it as soon as possible. The Soviets thought 1918 was the right year, but the Poles had to spend another three years persuading them at gunpoint to get off their soil for once. Witold Pilecki fought so fearlessly that he was a hero by the time he was 19, but the war did not destroy his youth or his future.
At the age of 20, he returned to secondary school, finished and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. He should have become a painter, but his family’s financial difficulties forced him to become a man supporting his mother and siblings. But even this unpredictable change of life plans did not deter him. He rebuilt and ran his home estate in Sukurcze, in present-day Belarus, so successfully that the family was soon financially secure, and at the age of 30 he created his own when he married a young teacher, Maria Ostrowska.
Life on the estate has become almost idyllic. In 1932, a son Andrzej was born, followed by a daughter Zofia the following year. Maria taught, while Witold painted, wrote poems, organised farmers and taught them modern farming, was a leader of the volunteer fire brigade, a volunteer in humanitarian societies and a reserve soldier. During his training, his abilities were initially assessed as average, but he soon became “excellent” and “fit to lead”.
He has certainly guided the family with a firm yet gentle hand. “First thing in the morning, we had to report to Daddy that we had finished our tasks, such as saying our prayers, washing up and brushing our teeth. Then we were ready for breakfast,” Zofia later recalled that Witold’s upbringing was always quite military, but at the same time sensitive.
“He encouraged my appreciation of nature. He showed me a ladybird and told me that it too was part of God’s creation. I remember how he taught us [my brother and I] everything, as if he knew that his time was fast running out and he would soon have to leave us … Above all, he always said that one must be courageous; that the most important thing is to speak the truth, beginning with the everyday events of life; that one must be able to admit one is wrong. He did not tolerate lying and fantasising. He wanted me to learn to cope in every situation … Faith, hope, love, God, honour and country. When I think back to those times, I realise that my father tried to pass on these ‘signposts’ to us, taking into account our childish perception of life. I cannot fully understand this combination of his remarkable sensitivity and tender feelings, and his stubbornness and determination to discover the truth.”
But Witold Pilecki did not only guide his children through life. His sister-in-law Eleonora Ostrowska was left alone with her son Marek: “He often took care of me. I remember being afraid of the dark. Pilecki bought me a child’s sword and I fell asleep at night clutching it tightly in my hand.”
Volunteering in Auschwitz
Children’s hands were often in Witold’s hands, and in September 1939, his hands were clutching a rifle. The Germans attacked the Poles, and Britain and France did nothing to help, even though they declared war on Germany two days later, on 3 September.
The Poles are left alone. Witold Pilecki did not hesitate. He immediately joined the 19th Polish Cavalry and set out to defend the western border, but his unit was quickly broken up. During the German invasion, 66,000 Polish soldiers died. Seven thousand were captured and many fled to France. Witold had never thought of such a thing. He took off the uniform of the defeated army, returned to Warsaw, which fell on 28 September, and decided to fight the Germans in secret.
In November 1939, he and Jan Wlodarkiewicz founded the Polish Secret Army, one of the first resistance movements on Polish soil, and began to build their network. He soon merged with the Home Army, or Armia Krajowa (AK), and was always up to date with the news, which included that the conditions in Auschwitz were appalling. But are the stories of the released camp inmates to be believed? They seemed so unbelievable that nobody could imagine that they could be true.
Someone had to check what was happening there. Someone trustworthy. Witold Pilecki volunteered to be him. “Because of the danger, everything was shrouded in secrecy, so we children knew as little as possible. But I felt that something was happening. My father was in Warsaw, we lived 100 kilometres away. We used to visit him. He taught us how to behave during the occupation,” his son Andrzej, who was 8 years old when his father was taken away, later reported.
In fact, they did not take him. He allowed himself to be arrested. If he was lucky and they didn’t kill him immediately, he would get to Auschwitz, he thought. He began to prepare to leave. To protect his family, he assumed a false identity and became Tomasz Serafinski. While staying in one of the safe houses, he found his papers and, convinced that Serafinski had died in September 1939, he replaced his photograph with his own and took his name.
Then he waited. In the early hours of 19 September 1940, a major raid finally took place in the Zoliborz district of Warsaw. The Germans knocked on people’s doors and captured almost 2000 Polish men. Pilecki had just been to his sister-in-law Eleonora Ostrowski’s house. A householder and member of the resistance movement warned him of the danger. He was told to run away, he was robbed. “Witold refused the opportunity and made no attempt to hide in my flat,” Eleonora later recalled, and his nephew:
“Someone knocked on the door and my mother answered. A soldier in a German uniform stood at the door and asked in Polish if there were any men in the house.” Before Eleonora could answer, Pilecki came out of the room with her nephew in her arms. He asked. He was ordered to get dressed and go with them. He went, but not before whispering to his sister-in-law, “You know I obeyed orders.”
On the morning of 21 September 1940, he walked through the gates of Auschwitz: “I was saying goodbye to everything I had known in this world and entering something that no longer seemed to be part of it. Our ideas of law and order and what is normal, everything we had become accustomed to in this world, had suffered a brutal blow.”
The Nazis met the campers with blows. “When we arrived at Auschwitz, they took off the barbed wire handcuffs and started hitting us over the heads with sticks and guns. The next day it was just beatings, beatings, beatings. I asked my friend: ‘Why are they beating us so badly? Are they beating us for a reason?’ They were beating us for nothing. There was no reason,” Tadeusz Sobolewicz, prisoner number 23,053, recalled his first day in Auschwitz on 20 November 1940.
Witold’s first day is also firmly etched in his memory. “Together with a hundred other people, I finally made it to the bathroom … Here they shaved off our hair and hair and sprayed us with ice water to make us realise we were there. Here I had two teeth knocked out because I was carrying my number plate in my hand instead of between my teeth, as the bademeister had demanded that day. A stake came down hard on my teeth. I spat out two. I started bleeding … From that moment on, we were just numbers.”
He did not allow himself to be broken, neither physically nor mentally, his comrades were not so strong. “I was haunted by one thought: wake up all these people and make them move.” The sight of the prisoners disappointed him. “What irritated me most was the passivity of the group of Poles. Everyone they arrested was already showing signs of mob psychology, and the result was that our whole group behaved like a bunch of passive sheep.”
Yet he recognised something else in his fellow prisoners. “After standing shoulder to shoulder with the Poles, I felt that we were united by our rage, our desire for revenge. Now I felt that I was in the right environment, fully prepared to start my work. I had discovered in myself a substitute for joy … After a while, I was horrified as to whether I was normal at all – joy, here – this must have been mad. But I felt joy, and that’s why I wanted to start work immediately, so as not to give in to despair.”
A man of indomitable spirit
Starting work meant organising Polish prisoners. He wanted to set up a kind of military organisation that would keep morale up in the camp, but would also be able to take control of the camp by force when the order came to do so. According to his plans, the camp would have to be attacked from the outside by the Home Army, and if not by the Allies, and the camp invaders would take it from the inside.
But first he had to report on what was happening in the camp, so he needed colleagues to smuggle the reports out into the open. Most of them travelled with released prisoners, but sometimes also with railway workers. He had to find all these people himself, but with each new contact there was a danger that someone would betray him. Nevertheless, by March 1942 he had 500 prisoners under his wing, and 500 more the following year.
Members of his organisation provided food and clothing, among other things. Tadeusz Sobolewicz was in charge of stealing food. They used it to help patients in the camp hospital. “Many of my friends stole sugar from the warehouse, that was our duty.”
The duties of the camp resisters also included some very unusual but effective ones. Since they had no weapons to resist their torturers, they started collecting lice infected with typhus. They put them on the clothes of the most brutal trainees and watched them fall ill. Although the SS noticed that the most sadistic among them were unusually susceptible to the disease, they had no idea why.
Prisoners were thus given a modicum of satisfaction in a world where they were at the mercy of the most cruel sadists. “He jumped on a man’s chest, kicked him in the kidneys, in his private parts. He knocked him down as quickly as possible, forcing us to stand there in silence. This scene went through us like an electric current,” recalled Pilecki.
“That was the first time I witnessed a premeditated murder. The SS commander ordered the prisoner to be eliminated. He grabbed him by the nape of the neck and banged him on the metal side of the cart until his brains fell out. He was dead.” Tadeusz Sobolewicz has seen many more cruel deaths since then, but they did not break him. Many of them did. When they simply could not stand the suffering any longer, they ran to the barbed wire as if they were out of their minds and tried to climb over it. Their lives ended under the lightning.
Casimir Albin, prisoner number 118, survived, although his initial unwavering belief that “all will be well if we only work hard” soon dissolved into the realisation that “work is only a way of destroying us”. The prisoners worked themselves to exhaustion and death. Among other things, they broke rocks to build new buildings for the camp, which was expanding rapidly. Pilecki was almost killed by his work in the quarry. He contracted typhus and then pneumonia. He was not treated for either disease. There was no cure for his stomach problems and no remedy for lice. There was nothing to protect him from extreme cold or heat.
“I was probably fighting the hardest battle of my life. The problem was how to eat now and have something left for the morning … Oh! The intensity of hunger moves up the whole scale of escalation. Sometimes you felt you would be able to cut a piece off a corpse lying next to the hospital.”
He described one of his best days in 1942 as follows: “In that splendid morgue of the half-living – in it someone near me was drawing his last breath; someone else was dying; someone was struggling to get out of bed but fell on the floor; another was throwing off his blanket, or speaking frantically to his mother, shouting or cursing someone; [some] in a fever, refusing food or demanding water and trying to jump out of the window, arguing with the doctor or begging for something – I lay there thinking that I still had the strength to understand everything that was happening and to overcome it calmly.”
His camp resistance network, the Union of Military Organisations, or ZOW, was already in full swing. He divided it into cells. There were five people in each. The leader of each cell was the most reliable member of the resistance and had to swear before Pilecki to fight for common ideas. He only knew the names of those who were under his control. Thus, he could not endanger the network if the Germans discovered him and he could not withstand their torture.
Should I stay or should I go?
Pilecki quickly noticed that the camp was a “test of character”. In it, “every man was what he was, and that was what he was worth. We were all just our basic essence.” Some, he wrote, had slipped into “a moral quagmire”, others had “carved their character into the finest crystal”.
All the time he watched how the camp changed people. He also had to fight within himself not to “become someone else”. In moments of weakness, he found strength in faith and patriotism. He watched how, constantly surrounded by corpses, he became insensitive, so he consciously wanted to remember all his dead comrades. “To be honest, can I write that ‘a great void has been left behind’? I miss them all.”
For two and a half years, he watched the Nazis kill them, but also watched Auschwitz expand and turn from a labour camp for prisoners into a death factory. “We built crematoria for ourselves,” he wrote, and continued:
“Yes, the image of Auschwitz has changed radically. Back then, you couldn’t see (at least not in the camp itself) heads being smashed to pieces with a shovel, or someone being killed by a board being driven into his guts, or the chest of a helpless prisoner being broken as he lay on the floor. Not a rib was broken by the pressure of the body of one of the degenerate butchers, who, with their heavy boots, jumped on the chest of a prisoner.” At that time, in accordance with the “Final Solution” of the Jewish question, thousands were already being killed in silence, in the gas cells and crematoria that the prisoners had set up in the annexed Birkenau between March and June 1943.
“More than a thousand were gassed a day, arriving on new transports. The corpses were burned in new crematoria”, Pilecki reported on the murdered Jews, sarcastically remarking that the Nazis had “changed their murder methods” and that they were now “more civilised”. In the gas chambers, he continued, people were “so crammed that they could not even fall into traps when they died”.
He handwrote everything he saw on a piece of paper and sent it to his government in London. The first courier took the message to Gdansk, the second to Stockholm and the third to London. All of them had forged identity documents showing that they were German, because only Germans could travel freely along this route without passes.
In his messages, Witold constantly asked for help. He waited patiently for orders when the prisoners were to strike, to be timed to coincide with the attack of the resistance troops who were about to storm the camp, but he never got the order. However, rumours reached him that the Germans were going to tighten security conditions, that men fit for work were going to be transferred to Germany, and that he was on their heels. By now, several members of his network had been killed and it was only a matter of time before he too was exposed.
Should he stay and continue to write without effect, or should he personally draw the world’s attention to the atrocities he is witnessing? He chose the latter. He slowly transferred his duties to his close colleagues and arranged to work on Easter Monday in 1943 in a bakery outside the camp. This was not so difficult, because over the previous two and a half years he had managed to put his own people in a number of key positions, and so, after 947 days spent voluntarily in Auschwitz, he was ready to escape.
Together with fellow prisoners Jan Redze and Edward Ciesielski, he took advantage of a moment of inattention on the part of a guard, cut the telephone wire, broke through the door and became one of only 143 prisoners to escape from hell in the history of Auschwitz. Shots were fired at the trio, and one hit Witold, but it did not kill him. After a few months in hiding in the countryside, he returned to Warsaw again in August 1943 under a new false name, Roman Jezierski.
“It was never clear to me that my father was going to hell. I never thought he could die. I don’t remember praying or worrying about anything happening to him,” his daughter later recalled. But she did not see her father immediately after his return. He first moved back in with his sister-in-law in Warsaw, then found a safe house in which to continue his resistance work. He wrote an 11-page report and sent it back to London.
Always Stay Up to Date
Subscribe to our newsletter to get our newest articles instantly!
Away from children, but with them
Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt have now learned of his experience. Witold Pilecki expected much, but got nothing. Britain was geographically far too remote from Eastern Europe for its intelligence officers to believe what was happening there. Already convinced from the outset that the reports of the liberated Poles were to be taken with a pinch of salt, they judged Pilecki’s to be unreliable too.
Witold made no secret of his disappointment and bitterness, but surrender was not in his character. He fought on, and unwittingly, the real Tomasz Serafinski had to pay the price for Poland’s freedom. It turned out that he was not really dead, but in December 1943 the Gestapo knocked on his door and accused him of having escaped from Auschwitz. They interrogated him long and brutally, and he kept repeating that he had not escaped from anywhere, so much so that on 14 January 1944 they finally believed him and released him. Witold did not resent having got him into trouble that could have cost him his head. They even became friends.
Pilecki continued to hide from the Nazis. Whenever he could, he visited his family, who had settled in Ostrow Mazowiecka in the north-east of the country in April 1940.
“Dear Zosienka, you have such beautiful hair, but you want to cut it. Try to keep it. More patience!” he wrote to his daughter in October 1943. Since he rarely saw his children, he tried to educate and guide them in his letters as if he were at home.
“Seek out your equals – the strong ones – and measure yourself against them. You will succeed, so thrust your sabre deep into your opponent! But if you destroy a weak creature, a fragile human being, if you take their life, even if God protects them – that is an act of cowardice, not of chivalry,” he wrote to his son sometime in 1943 or 1944.
Sometimes his words were harsh, but he could tell from his children’s letters that he had hurt them. “My dear boy, I am desperately sorry that I cannot hold you to my bosom. You took my rhyming remarks to heart and probably burst into tears. But as befits a knight, you thank me kindly for the letter,” he wrote on 28 May 1944 to his son, who was then 12 years old.
For example, while risking his life for the freedom of his country, he advised his son in letters on how to make shelves: ‘When you do this, you must saw calmly, evenly and gently, so that the blade does not crack. You must be calm and move your hand steadily, without pressing on the saw blade … When I had eight of them, I made lovely boxes, shelves and all the picture frames. Over the years, this ability of mine, which is, by the way, very pleasant, has proved to be very useful.”
At that time, he already suspected that the Soviet Union was not really their ally. In April 1943, it came to light that some 22,000 Polish officers had been killed in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Stalin denied Soviet responsibility for the massacre, but the Poles did not have to think very deeply to conclude that Stalin might not only want to defeat Hitler in Poland, but also the Poles. Nevertheless, they did not expect what followed when the Russians defeated the Germans in eastern Poland in the spring of 1944 and began to penetrate westwards.
With liberation so close, the well-organised Polish Home Army decided to drive the Germans out of their capital. On 1 August 1941, it took up arms against them in the so-called Warsaw Uprising. It expected the Soviets to continue their westward penetration and help them take the capital.
“I think Stalin hated Poland and all Poles. It was a personal hatred. Until September, we Poles believed we had a chance. The Red Army would enter Warsaw without any problems, it would go through and try to get to Germany. Within six months, it might even enter Berlin. But Stalin did not want that. He had other plans,” Wladyslaw Bartoszewski later reflected.
The Soviets were only 20 minutes’ flight time from Warsaw, but their planes did not fly towards it, nor did they allow the Americans to help the Poles with supplies from the air. They were only allowed to drop one load. The British gave them a few help, but otherwise Warsaw, where the fighting was raging, was slowly running out of everything, from food to weapons.
For Warsaw until your last breath
Although he was on the run, Witold Pilecki could not stand by. He first joined the home army under a false name, but when he saw that there was a shortage of officers, he revealed his true identity and became the leader of a company that had to occupy a building on Jerusalem Avenue, from which the main east-west transport route could be controlled.
“In the first two weeks of the first month, he won, lost and regained this building almost every day. He was constantly chased out of it, but he kept coming back, and with remarkable cunning he drove back the German defenders time after time. As long as he threatened this vital point, the German command constantly felt threatened,” wrote historian Norman Davis.
Pilecki became one of the heroes again, but as in Auschwitz, he did not get the help he had hoped for. The Soviets stood still on the east bank of the Vistula, waiting for events to unfold. It came 63 days after the start of a rebellion which, according to Polish plans, should have lasted only about seven days: the Home Army surrendered.
Furious at the rebellion, Hitler ordered the destruction of Warsaw. Houses fell, disappearing street by street. Around 180,000 people died. Between 80 and 90 per cent of the city was razed to the ground. The people felt betrayed, but their distrust was not only directed against Stalin, but also against the home army.
First, they nearly starved for two months, and then they watched everything they had created in their lives crumble under the bombs. To them, the soldiers of the Home Army were not heroes fighting for our common freedom, even though 18 000 of them lost their lives and 15 000 were captured.
Among them was Witold Pilceki, who at the time wrote his name Roman Jezierski. He landed in the German prisoner-of-war camp Marnau and lived there until 28 April 1945, when the camp was liberated by the Americans. Two months later, he was on his way again, not to Poland, but to Italy. There, he joined the II Polish Corps under General Wladyslaw Anders and landed in an intelligence unit. Before taking up his new assignments, he sat down to write his third and most comprehensive report on Auschwitz.
Meanwhile, Poland was suffering a fate similar to that after the end of the First World War. The Soviet Union set up its communist government and began persecuting members of the former Home Army. Witold Pilecki, a hero of World War I and World War II and a voluntary prisoner of Auschwitz, was given a new task – to gather as much information as possible about the new government’s actions and crimes.
On 8 December 1945, aged 44, he was back in Warsaw. Officially, he had taken a job as a construction site supervisor, unofficially he was weaving his new intelligence network. He had to start from scratch. Warsaw was destroyed. People were looking for each other, but it was almost impossible to find anyone. The old addresses simply no longer existed. But for Witold, no obstacle was insurmountable.
He won over many former comrades from Auschwitz and members of the inter-war resistance network who were now working in offices. Among other things, he allegedly managed to obtain documents proving that the 1946 popular referendum had been forged, and a document on the secret agreement between Poland and Russia, whereby Poland itself asked the Red Army to station itself on Polish soil.
His son Andrzej was just over 13 years old when he saw his father in the spring of 1946. He was on his way to the Red Forest to demobilise the young anticommunists who lived there.
“He had to get the young people out of the forest and tell them that there will be no World War III, so it is pointless to stay in the forest. The task was difficult. Why? Because he could have been discovered and killed on the spot or sent to Siberia. For this reason, he could not reveal to the young people that he was an officer, and they only listened to officers.”
Pilecki was extradited shortly afterwards. General Anders ordered him to return to Italy immediately. He refused. “I will stay. Someone has to stay, whatever the consequences.” He went into hiding and continued his resistance work, visiting his family whenever he could. His son never forgot the last time he met his father.
“We lived on the road to Warsaw. He came to us. He was very sad. He played the piano by himself. He revealed who he was to my friends. I was with them, he came to us and showed us some games. He was very happy that my sister and I had so many friends and we were not loners. We moved from the East and everything was different in Mazowsze. He was very happy that we had company and that our friends liked us.”
The deadly communist hand
When he left, he didn’t know he was leaving for good. He was arrested by the secret police on 8 May 1947. He was accused of many things, including spying for the British Secret Service and plotting to assassinate leading figures in what was then Communist Poland. He was tortured. “His fingernails were ripped off, his ribs were broken and his nose was broken. His interrogation was very difficult. They tortured him severely,” wrote historian Jacek Pawlovicz. “Compared to them, Auschwitz was a joke,” Witold Pilecki told his wife when she visited him after six months of torture in Mokotow prison.
They wanted him to sign a false confession and expose his network. He did not talk, but he did reveal where he had hidden copies of his Auschwitz report to protect his family. “Two secret police officers came with Pilecki’s letter and his signature. It said that my mother had to hand over all the papers she had. This was probably how he saved her from arrest and interrogation,” recalled his nephew Marek Ostrowski.
The trial began in March 1948. It was a farce. “Communist propaganda portrayed him in the worst possible light – as a traitor, a mercenary of imperialist countries”, Marek Ostrowski was still outraged years later. No pleas for clemency from Witold’s comrades in Auschwitz helped, neither during the trial nor afterwards, when on 15 March 1948 he was found guilty of a number of charges, including “betraying state secrets”. He was sentenced to death. The death sentence was usually carried out 95 to 105 days after the verdict was handed down. Witold Pilecki was executed on 25 May 1948, two months after the conclusion of the trial.
At 9.30 he was taken to the basement of Mokotow Prison. On the way he was seen by Father Jan Stepien, chaplain of the Home Army. His death sentence was later commuted to 15 years in prison. “They tied a white bandage over his mouth. Two guards held him under his arms. He could hardly touch the ground with his feet. I don’t know if he was conscious at that time. He seemed completely unconscious.”
He was executed as was the custom at the time – with a single shot at point-blank range to the back of the head. Then all trace of him was lost. His family was not told that he was no longer alive. His wife Maria sent him a food parcel every month. In prison he had always been accepted, but now he was refused. “He is no longer here”, she was told. They did not tell her where he was supposed to go and so neither she nor the child ever stopped looking for him.
“As for his conviction – we didn’t believe it was really carried out. We were not informed about it, there was no body. We hoped, especially my mother, that he would be useful [to the Communists] because he was so active and knew so much about the different organisations. We deluded ourselves that he might still be alive, maybe in Lubyanka [prison] or in Siberia”, recalled his son Andrzej.
As if it were not enough that they had to live with this insecurity, they also had to live with power. Maria could not get a job, her two children could not go to the high school and university of their choice. No one knew anything about what their father had done during the war. Drop by drop, they only learned the truth over the years, and the avalanche of information came after 1989, when the Iron Curtain and the Polish communist government fell. In 1990, Witold Pilecki was finally rehabilitated and, almost 60 years after his death, the tributes began to pour in.
This is also the first time that the story of his heroism during the Second World War has been brought to the public’s attention. Until now, the communist authorities have studiously kept it hidden so that they would not have to explain how Witold Pilecki died. When the archives were opened in 1990, his loved ones finally learned the truth, but they have still not found peace.
No one knew where his remains lay. Mass graves have been found, but not his remains. “He was killed by two great icons, the Nazis and the Communists. What a Polish story, to stand upright against two great enemies until the very end. He paid for it with his life,” Wladyslaw Bartoszewski proudly described Witold Pilecki.
Jarek Garlinski said of him: ‘Endowed with extraordinary physical resilience and courage, he showed incredible judgment and common sense and a complete absence of self-pity in rather disgusting circumstances. While most of the prisoners who were not sentenced to immediate death at Auschwitz barely managed to survive, he had enough reserves of strength and determination left to help others and to build a resistance organisation in the camp. Not only that, but he managed to keep a clear head at all times and to recognise what he had to do to survive.”
