A repost from September 2017:
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.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.
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....
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:
The lists have up to 57 data fields for each entry, beginning with:
ABE Arthur WalterA whole bunch of Germans. Thousands of 'em.
ABEL Gustav
ABEL Franz
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
So don't call them "Polish concentration camps".
On to a Polish guy.
Lifted in toto from VICE:
Witold Pilecki, before his incarceration.
All photos courtesy of the Rotamaster Pilecki Museum
All photos courtesy of the Rotamaster Pilecki Museum
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.
....MUCH MORE, unfortunately the picture links have rotted so here's a colorized version of his camp identification photo set via another source:
