A Polish Patriot Who Volunteered for Auschwitz

Who would choose to go to a concentration camp? Witold Pilecki, Polish patriot, that’s who. Born in Olonets, Karelia, in northwest Russia, Pilecki descended from Polish patriots and was raised to be patriotic. In 1914, he entered scouting, an organization then banned by the Russian state. Four years later, he sneaked into Poland, which had gained its independence after 123 years.

The following year, a Polish-Soviet War started, and Pilecki wanted to defend his country. A cavalryman, he participated in the Battle of Grodno, the Battle of Warsaw, and the Żeligowski’s Mutiny. For his actions during this war, he twice earned the Polish Cross of Valour. After that war ended, he married and fathered two children. He rebuilt his family estate and started painting.

But on September 1, 1939, the Third Reich invaded Poland, starting World War II. The Polish Army was defeated in weeks. Russia annexed eastern Poland, and the Germans took the western half, including Warsaw. Under the Germans, officers such as Pilecki developed confidential networks that would become the Underground State and the Home Army.

In 1940, the Germans established Auschwitz Concentration Camp at Oświęcim to thwart Polish opposition to German rule. The first transport of captives from Warsaw, in August 1940, included two members of Pilecki’s organization. Pilecki decided that if he got himself arrested and sent to Auschwitz, he could gather intelligence and organize inmate resistance. His comrades supported his plan.

On September 19, 1940, at age 39, Pilecki allowed the Germans to arrest him in Warsaw, along with 2,000 others. After two days of detention involving beatings and torture, he ended up at Auschwitz. He reported:

Together with a hundred other people, I at least reached the bathroom. Here we gave everything away into bags, to which respective numbers were tied. Here our hair of head and body were cut off, and we were slightly sprinkled by cold water. I got a blow in my jaw with a heavy rod. I spat out my two teeth. Bleeding began. From that moment we became mere numbers—I wore the number 4859.

As an inmate, he endured stomach ailments, typhus, pneumonia, lice infestations, backbreaking toil hauling rocks, extremes of heat and cold, relentless hunger, and abuse by German guards. But he formed an underground resistance group, the Union of Military Organization. The union sought to uphold prisoners’ morale, pass news from the outside to prisoners, gather food and clothing, pass intelligence to those outside the camp, and prepare divisions to take over if attacked from the outside.

SS soldiers assigned Poles to take their laundry into town, and sometimes messages for the underground Polish army went along with the dirty clothes. The organization provided the underground valuable information about the camp, sending reports to Warsaw starting in October 1940. The Polish resistance started sending Pilecki’s reports to the British government in March 1941.

At first, Poles in the camp were killed brutally in public; after a while, exposure to the elements, concealed shootings, and phenol injections prevailed. By the end of the war, Poles would be the third largest group of victims at Auschwitz, after Hungarian Jews and Polish Jews. Soviet prisoners there became the victims of the first gassing by Zyklon B. “The men had been so tightly packed,” Pilecki wrote, “that even in death they could not fall over.”

The mass gassing of Jews, which began in 1942, prompted Pilecki to write, “Over a thousand a day from the new transports were gassed. The corpses were burnt in the new crematoria.” That year, Pilecki’s reports were broadcast using a radio transmitter built inside the camp and contained details on the number of arrivals and deaths and inmates’ condition. One of the early signs of Auschwitz's true purpose to Pilecki was the prisoners’ diet: The food rations were calculated so that people would live for six weeks. The underground army couldn’t believe Pilecki’s tales of horror about ovens, gas chambers, and injections to murder people. They thought he was exaggerating.

But the Gestapo soon discovered the members of the underground and killed many of them. Pilecki decided to escape, hoping to convince the Home Army’s leaders to try to rescue the prisoners. On the night of April 26-27, 1943, Pilecki and two other inmates escaped through a poorly secured back door in a bakery, where he worked. As they ran into the night, shots followed them.  

He contacted the Home Army units a few days later and reached Warsaw a month after escaping. Pilecki’s report estimated that, by March 1943, the number of people gassed would have reached 1.5 million. The Polish underground lacked the men to attack the camp, so they asked the Soviets to help but they didn’t want to. By the time he rejoined the Polish underground, the problem was how to fight the German occupation even as Soviet occupation again threatened.

On February 23, 1944, Pilecki was promoted to cavalry captain and joined a secret organization known as “NIE.” Its goal was to prepare resistance against a possible Soviet occupation. In August 1944, the Warsaw Uprising broke out, the largest offensive undertaken by any resistance movement in Europe during the war. Pilecki hid his rank to fight there because soldiers in NIE were forbidden to risk their lives. A hero of the uprising, he held Warsaw’s major east-west thoroughfare and then an important position near the railway station. Meanwhile, the Soviets halted outside Warsaw, allowing the Germans to kill more than 100,000 Poles, most of them civilians, many of whom would have resisted Soviet rule as they resisted German rule. After two months, the Germans subdued the uprising, which destroyed most of Warsaw, and Pilecki ended up a POW.

The prisoners of Auschwitz were liberated in May 1945, the year Pilecki wrote his final report on Auschwitz.

The Soviet re-entry into Poland brought with it the installation of a Communist regime. In October 1945, Pilecki headed to Italy, reporting to the command of a Polish Army unit that had helped the Americans and British defeat the Germans. He began another undercover assignment—to gather intelligence about growing Soviet atrocities and send it to the Polish government-in-exile. This mission marked him as an enemy of the state. In 1946, any hope that Poland would be free was dashed. He and the remaining resistance soldiers in Poland were ordered to go to the West or return to their civilian lives. But Pilecki declined to do either.

On May 8, 1947, the Polish Communist secret police arrested Pilecki and tortured him before his trial. He was accused of crossing the border illegally, using forged documents, not enlisting in the military, carrying illegal arms, spying, “foreign imperialism,” and planning to assassinate several officials. Pilecki denied the assassination plot and pleaded guilty to the other charges, but he called his actions legal and in the interest of Free Poland. His trial merely a show, he was executed with a bullet to the back of the head on May 25, 1948. He was 47 years old. His Auschwitz heroism counted for nothing with the Communists, who prosecuted several individuals who reported on the Holocaust or tried to aid its victims.

In 1990, Witold Pilecki was absolved of all charges. For decades, Pilecki’s story was unknown, suppressed by Soviet censorship. They couldn’t speak about his anti-Nazi actions without mention of his anti-communist activities as well. The first publication of Witold’s Report took place in 2000, 55 years after the war. Pilecki’s 1945 report on his undercover mission at Auschwitz was published in English for the first time in 2012, titled The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery. Pilecki, a sympathetic though precise observer of the fate of others, gave us one of the few diaries of concentration camp inmates.

A movie about Wilecki, called Operation Auschwitz, has been made. And today a street in Warsaw bears his name.

“I tried to live in such a way that, when dying, I would rather feel happy than scared.” – W. Pilecki