Tomorrow (September 19) is the anniversary of Withold
deliberately getting himself arrested so he could get into Auschwitz to have a look around, see what the Nazis were up to.
As I noted back in 2014:
At the time Witold entered Auschwitz, late September 1940, it was a
medium scale torture and mass shooting concentration camp operation with
mainly Polish Christian victims.
Concurrent with the 1941-42
construction of the Aktion Reinhard extermination camps,
Bełżec,Chełmno, Sobibór, and Treblinka, Auschwitz II-Birkenau was built
adjacent to the concentration camp and industrial scale mass murder
began.
In addition to surviving 31 months in the camp Pilecki was one of only 900-some people known to have escaped, out of the millions who entered the
camp.
After his escape he went to Warsaw to help organize the Polish resistance that culminated in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
After the Germans surrendered Witold was instrumental in developing anti-Soviet intelligence operations....
Somewhere around a third to a half of the people who attempted the escape were successful so 300-400 or so. A point, which in no way detracts from his amazing skills, is that he, and virtually all the rest of the escapees made it out of Auschwitz I. As far as I know only two people made it out of Auschwitz II-Birkenau—simply because it was out of the freight cars, into the gas chambers, up the smokestack, in 6-to-12 hours.
Back to the survival skills, when he went to Warsaw following the escape he initially presented as an enlisted man and only after many of the officers above him were killed did he reveal himself to actually be a Captain of Cavalry/Intelligence.
Somehow he survived the Uprising as well, although captured he continued working for the Home Army and then made his way to Italy.
In 1947 the Soviets thought "This is a very resourceful guy".
So they killed him.
One last thing.
The Poles really, really dislike it when the murder factories are referred to as Polish.
The Reinhard camps were conceived of, designed by and staffed by German Nazis.
And Ukrainians in some places.
To pound the point home they released an amazing piece of scholarship earlier this year, a database of all the known commanders and personnel:
Database containing Auschwitz personnel made available online
The
lists have up to 57 data fields for each entry, beginning with:
ABE Arthur Walter
ABEL Gustav
ABEL Franz
A whole bunch of Germans. Thousands of 'em.
There are Polish names in there but even in those cases they are often not Poles.
One of the very last names,
ZWOLINSKI Stefan, is an example:
Miejsce urodzenia / Geburtsort / Place of Birth: Kimpolung
That's Romanian Moldova (I looked it up)
So don't call them "Polish concentration camps".
On to a Polish guy.
Lifted in toto
from VICE:
On September 19, 1940, Witold Pilecki, a Polish soldier, was captured
by German SS officers and sent to the concentration camp in Auschwitz.
Considering he was a spy, things had turned out exactly as he’d planned.
Captain Pilecki's mission was to organize resistance from within the
most horrific symbol of the Holocaust, send information to the Allies,
and record the horrors he witnessed for the sake of history.
Pilecki arrived in Auschwitz sometime in the evening between September
21 and 22, 1940, and described what he found as "another planet"—a hell
in which every building's walls were covered in swastikas and corpses
lay everywhere. Pilecki went on to live in inhumane conditions for
nearly 1,000 days and become the first person to inform the Allies about
the appalling conditions of detention and the atrocities committed by
the Nazi regime.
Pilecki’s comprehensive 1945 report on his undercover mission was published in English in 2012 under the title
The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery.
Yet, for some reason, his story still isn't widely known. I wanted to
know more about the career of this exceptional man, so I got in touch
with the people who recently translated the book in French—former
director of the AFP bureau in Warsaw, Urszula Hyzy, and Patrick Godfard,
who is a professor of history.
VICE: The book was published in English in 2012, with the New York Times describing it as "a historical document of the greatest importance." How come it was only translated to French now?
Urszula Hyzy and Patrick Godfard: Pilecki was a
"disturbing" character for the Allies, who pretended for a long time not
to know what was happening in the camps, and for the Communists, who
were responsible for his death in 1948. In communist Poland, it was
forbidden to talk about Pilecki and his children were barred from higher
education.
The Auschwitz Volunteer remained in the archives of the Polish
Underground Movement Study Trust in London [Studium Polski Podziemnej]
before being discovered by the historian and former prisoner Józef
Garlinski, who wrote
Fighting Auschwitz: The Resistance Movement in the Concentration Camp in the 1970s. It was not until after the end of the Cold War that the book was published in Poland.
Witold Pilecki in Auschwitz.
What did Pilecki do before his arrival at Auschwitz?
Pilecki was 40 years old when he voluntarily went in under the alias
Tomasz Serafinski. He was a young, well-trained soldier who had
participated in the Russo-Polish War of 1919–1920; in September 1939,
the beginning of the Second World War, he'd fought against the Germans
under the command of Major Jan Włodarkiewicz. Together with
Włodarkiewicz they built a resistance movement, the Polish Secret Army,
which expanded rapidly across Poland.
In the summer of 1940, raids began in Warsaw; the Germans used to stop
people randomly and deport them to Auschwitz, which had just opened.
These raids were meant to sow terror and to put together a servile
workforce. Major Włodarkiewicz and Pilecki decided to learn more about
the camp where, two members of their organization were already interned.
They wanted to organize the fight from within, and Pilecki volunteered
to do it.
Once he was a prisoner, what did he do exactly?
He soon began to implement what they called the "conspiracy." In the
fall of 1940, he created a network of five prisoners who didn’t know
each other, in order to limit losses in the event of arrests by the
Gestapo. His first task was to improve the life conditions of its
members. Priorities were for all members of the network to find a job
"under one roof," to avoid the harsh climatic conditions, to be under
the command of a non-brutal
kapo,
and to be better treated in hospitals by asking civilians to give them
drugs and vaccines. Pilecki and his network infiltrated most of the
camp’s administrations (you have to bear in mind that the SS used some
prisoners as second-in-commands) and succeeded.
Witold Pilecki and his wife, Maria
What did he do to communicate with the outside world, the clandestine Polish authorities, and the British?
The first reports were transmitted by released prisoners. Later,
everything was relative to the success of escape attempts. Some escapes
were truly spectacular—for example on June 20, 1942, four prisoners
armed and dressed as SS came out of the camp through the front door in
broad daylight, using the car of the camp commander. Information was
also transmitted via civilians. They were forwarded to the underground
HQ in Warsaw, and from there they were transmitted to the Polish
government, who were in exile in London.
Their most impressive feat was the making of a radio transmitter using
parts they found around the camp: It actually worked during several
months in 1942. It was hidden in the hospital, a place the SS were
reluctant to go to, and it'd transmit information at different times of
the day to avoid being detected. But a member of the organization was
too talkative, and this radio eventually had to be removed. Their
reports included essential information about the awful treatment of the
Jewish population of the camp.
Pilecki was one of the first to talk about the gas chambers in
Auschwitz II, in Birkenau. He gave a few details on the crematorium
furnaces. He obtained information by commandos who were working at
Birkenau, and he expanded his network to reach the extermination camp.
Pilecki also mentioned the killing of Gypsies: "They were liquidated in
the manner of Auschwitz," he wrote, that is to say, using Zyklon B gas.
He also mentioned the first test of this gas in September 1941, on
hundreds of Soviet prisoners.
What were the initial reactions of the free world?
Unfortunately, nobody believed him: British officials who read his
reports didn’t believe that gas chambers could exist. Why would the
Germans—who shot and starved the Jews on a daily basis—put in all this
effort? They thought it was an exaggeration from the Polish government
in exile because they were seeking more support from the Anglo-Saxon
Allies.
Witold Pilecki and his family, 1933
What else did he do while in the camp?
Pilecki's mission was not only to create a support network and to
inform but also to organize the fight. This struggle has taken different
forms. First, a constant struggle to avoid the pitfalls of the Germans,
save as many lives as possible, and try to kill the most dangerous SS
and informers.
The Germans had set up a mailbox for accusations: For any significant
denunciation, a prisoner was rewarded. Many letters were posted. Pilecki
and his comrades opened that box and read the letters carefully: They
destroyed the most dangerous letters and would post their own to
denounce the most malevolent individuals.
It was a daunting task to remove SS agents, because they couldn’t be
murdered. The organization raised a lice colony—carrying typhus—in the
hospital laboratory to infect SS agents. Several of them died that way.
Pilecki also developed a whole plan for an uprising in the camp. In
late 1942, Pilecki was convinced that his network—now composed of more
than a thousand deported prisoners—could take control of the central
camp for a short time. But, he insisted that a collective escape would
only be possible with the support of the Polish Underground Army and
Allied airdrops. Therefore, he waited for his superiors in Warsaw to
give him orders. But nothing came. He didn’t know that the Allies had no
intention of carrying out any operation on Auschwitz. And he didn’t
know that the leaders of the Polish resistance in Warsaw considered any
release operation suicidal, because the Germans had thousands of men in
the region.
Auschwitz concentration camp
How did he escape?
He decided to escape to further defend his cause with clandestine
authorities. In addition, he was starting to think that the SS knew
about the network: They had already hunted and arrested some of its
members and, fearing an uprising, decided to deport many Poles to other
camps.
He escaped in the middle of the night, between the 26th and 27th of
April 1943, along with two other prisoners, Jan Redzej and Edward
Ciesielski. They managed to be allocated the night shift at a bakery
located outside the camp. Two SS were on guard. Redzej had already used
fresh bread to make an imprint of the nut holding the hook of the door,
and they had made sure they had the right wrench to open it. Under their
striped prison uniforms, Pilecki and Ciesielski wore civilian clothes.
They also took tobacco with them to scatter behind them, so that dogs
couldn’t track them.
They waited for the two SS officers to be distracted, then opened the
door and ran. One of the SS tried to shoot them in vain. Just before
they escaped, someone had cut the phone lines. They ran until they
reached the Vistula. Boats were docked at the shore, but were restrained
by chains. Two of these chains were fastened together with a screw.
They were surprised by this coincidence: They used the same wrench, the
one they used on the door, to detach the chains. They walked dozens of
miles through the forest. To conceal their shaved heads, they had taken
the caps of civilians who were working with them in the bakery. A farmer
welcomed them, fed them, and gave them a roof for the night. On May 1,
they stumbled upon German soldiers who opened fire, and Pilecki was shot
in the arm. Finally, on May 2, they arrived at their final destination,
the house of an Auschwitz’s prisoner’s stepparents.
Pilecki wrote: "If we say what we feel, it
will help people understand what truly happened." Is it because of his
proto-gonzo approach that Pileski wasn’t believed for so long? Can we
have doubts about the veracity of his writings?
There is no doubt about the veracity of his reports. Other sources and
the work of historians at the Auschwitz museum corroborate it. But there
were sometimes a few inaccuracies in facts, on dates for example.
The Auschwitz Volunteer is far from a military, administrative
tone. Pilecki thought it was really important to describe his feelings.
He wanted to expose the truth while remaining neutral and objective.
And this is what makes his story so poignant.
