Peter O’Neill – Witold Pilecki
Witold Pilecki in cavalry uniform, colourised pre-19391 Witold Pilecki – The Forgotten Polish Patriot
Arguably, the world is most dangerous when it is blind. When the world decides to devote all of its attention to one place or one way of thinking, we let all sorts of horrors pass us by. It takes immense bravery and the greatest courage to survive these events, but it takes even more to volunteer to go through hell to prove and report on these events, so the world is no longer blind to them. This is the story of Witold Pilecki.
Witold Pilecki served his country, his community and the world during his adventurous life, and in forty-seven years, he saw Poland rise to become a nation once again, he fought to protect her against several foes, took part in the Warsaw Uprising and volunteered to enter Auschwitz Concentration Camp in order to report on the true nature of the camp. Sadly, like so many resistance heroes in Poland and Eastern Europe, his name was erased by the Communist regime for four decades and the story of his great deeds were almost lost. His life was taken by the Communists, but his legacy would outlive their governments and the Soviet Bloc.
Early Life
The Pilecki’s were of old Polish Nobility, but when Witold was born in 1901, there was no Poland: only the Russian Empire under the Czar2. When Witold was sixteen years old (the same age as me) he had already joined the movement for Polish freedom. The German Empire had conquered large swaths of Poland when the Russians descended into revolution. While the Russian Civil War raged
1 Nieznany, kolor: old photos in color - T.Bór Komorowski "Armia podziemna" Warsaw 1990, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29744046 2 Encyclopedia Britannica. 2020. Tsar.
1 Peter O’Neill – Witold Pilecki between Communists and Czarists, the oppressed nations of the Empire broke free. Finland, Lithuania, the Ukraine and Poland all became nations in the 1920s, but most would be brought back into the USSR in years to follow. Poland would not bow, and Witold took up arms alongside his
brothers, as the Poles managed to defeat the Soviets at the Battle of Warsaw! This left the USSR with a bloody nose, and it secured Polish freedom3, for a decade at least. With Poland safe, Witold returned to his family, got married, repaired his family home at Lida and gained his first medal, for his work for the people of Lida. But this peace would not last.4
German Troops crossing the Polish Border in a staged photo at Sopot5
The Fall of Poland
In 1939, Poland’s old enemies of Germany and Russia once again attacked, and with more success than in the 1920s. Even the strongest Polish positions could not hold out for long against the combined strength of the Red Army and the German Wehrmacht. Warsaw fell on the 27th of September and Witold Pilecki’s own unit was disbanded by the 17th of October. Building off of his old underground days, Pilecki founded the Secret Polish Army with his Commander Jan Włodarkiewicz6. Poland had capitulated and even after the massacres of Polish POWs and civilians, yet large resistance movements formed to resist the German and Soviet occupiers. Witold did not always agree with his comrades in the Secert Army, notably Włodarkiewicz’s ultranationalist and religious supremacy ideals, but he still volunteered to do anything to help Poland.
Witold’s Extraordinary Mission
As soon as Poland was partitioned between Germany and the USSR, both countries tried to purge their zones of political and military enemies. Tens of thousands of Polish soldiers and officers were executed at massacres such as the Katyn Forest, where 22,000 lost their lives to the Soviet NKVD7.
3 Encyclopedia Britannica. 2020. Poland - The Second Republic. 4 Theholocaustexplained.org. 2020. Invasion Of Poland – The Holocaust Explained: Designed For Schools. 5 The Jewish Chronicle: Germans crossing the border at Sopot https://www.thejc.com/news/features/danzig-the-city-where-hell-began-and-ended-1.488006 6 En.wikipedia.org. 2020. Jan Włodarkiewicz. 7 Encyclopedia Britannica. 2020. NKVD | Soviet Agency.
2 Peter O’Neill – Witold Pilecki
The Polish Campaign saw both dictatorships try to rid themselves of ‘undesirables’: Ethnic Poles, Communists, the disabled and the large Jewish population of Poland. A truly vicious cycle of killings continued, resistance took hold, leading to reprisals that then led to more resistance.
In November 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto was created in order to separate the Jewish Population from the rest of the people of Warsaw8. In April 1940, a simple army barracks of brick and mortar was converted to a prisoner camp for political prisoners, in the small town of Auschwitz9. Very little was known about this ‘concentration’ camp as it expanded, but decrypted radio communication left the British wanting to seek out further information. They made covert contact with the Secert Polish Army and asked them to investigate Auschwitz. Witold had heard of thousands of his countrymen being sent to this camp and volunteered to gather intelligence and organise resistance within Auschwitz.
At only thirty-nine years of age, Witold Pilecki, under the false-name Tomasz Serafinski, walked onto the streets of Warsaw during a routine sweep of the area by the Germans. Only a year after Poland was invaded, ‘Tomasz’ and 2,000 others were interned in a cavalry barracks, were the first beatings began. He was soon sent to Auschwitz and received his third name; 485910. One of the first stages of the dehumanisation process. In recognition for his actions up to this point, he was promoted to a First Lieutenant in the Secret Polish Army. Witold nearly immediately set up the Union of Military Organisations (ZOW) and quickly united the scattered resistance movements in the camp into one body. Even after a spell of pneumonia, Witold was adamant to maintain inmate morale, provide news from the outside world, distributing extra food and clothes, and most importantly, preparing the inmates for the attack that would liberate them. The ZOW fervently hoped that liberation would come from an Allied air-raid or an airborne assault from the famed Polish 1st Parachute Regiment.
The ZOW was the key to receiving any news from within Auschwitz and they provided extremely valuable information to both the Allies and the Secret Polish Army. The harrowing experiences of living within the sadistic society, where death was inevitable, provided the Allies with the true picture of Auschwitz. Not as a POW Camp or even just a concentration camp: it was a death camp. For two and half years, Witold fearlessly threw back the curtain on the atrocities of Auschwitz. He gave up his name and his freedom but never gave up his spirit for a free Poland. His intelligence gathering contributed to the brochure ‘The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland’11, that was distributed by the Polish-Government in exile to the twenty-six signatories of the United Nations in 1942. If Witold was killed before arriving in Auschwitz or if he never arrived at all, we may not have known as much about the camp or the near 1.1 million people who were killed within its gates.
Escape from Auschwitz
By 1943, after two and a half long years, Witold came to the unfortunate realisation that liberation would not come from an Allied raid. There was more than enough enthusiasm for a raid from the Polish 1st Parachute Regiment but the British simply lacked the range to make an effective air-raid on the camp and the Soviets were unsympathetic to the plight of the Poles and Jews, with similar amounts of antisemitism and anti-Polish sentiment in the USSR as there was in the Third Reich.
8 Theholocaustexplained.org. 2020. Warsaw Ghetto – The Holocaust Explained: Designed For Schools. 9 Auschwitz.org. 2020. History / Auschwitz-Birkenau. 10 Auschwitz.org. 2020. News / Museum / Auschwitz-Birkenau. 11 Jewishvirtuallibrary.org. 2020. The Mass Extermination Of Jews In German Occupied Poland.
3 Peter O’Neill – Witold Pilecki
Escape was the only option, seeing how the Allies were not willing to drop weapons or supplies directly onto the camp.
In mid-April, Witold was on duty in the bakery at Auschwitz when he and two others overpowered their guard, cut communication wires and broke out in the Polish countryside, taking with them German documents from the camp. They went from small town to small town being aided by a priest before making their way to a safe house in Bochnia. Incredibly this house was owned by the very commander Witold had used as his alias, Tomasz Serafinski12! Now a free man, no longer four digits or an inmate, he regrouped with the Home Army, but also joined a clandestine organisation. NIE (‘No’ in Polish and short for ‘independence’) was created in response to the fear that the Soviet advance into Poland would lead to another occupation. The NIE was anti-communist and hoped to guarantee Poland’s independence Post-War.
Witold became part of the intelligence and counter-intelligence wing of the Home Army and finally wrote about his time in Auschwitz. Sadly, after losing many operatives and even a paratrooper while investigating a possible assault on Auschwitz, it was decided that the Home Army lacked the sufficient strength to attack the camp without allied resources and manpower. But a different form of resistance was planned to take place in 1944.
The Warsaw Uprising and Occupation
The 1944 Warsaw Uprising was the single-largest piece of resistance in the entirety of WWII, with 50,000 Poles rising up in Warsaw to retake the city from the retreating Germans. Fierce house-to-house, street-to-street fighting occurred as the citizens of Warsaw, mostly unarmed13, attempted to assert their sovereignty before the Red Army arrived. But it would be the Red Army’s refusal to advance that would doom the uprising. The uprising would last two months. Soviet troops reached the Vistula and watched Warsaw burn in front of them. But Polish radio pleas were met with silence and a direct order from Joseph Stalin prohibited any advance into the City. Thanks to the Soviet halt, the Germans were able to regroup and crush the Uprising. Using heavy artillery, rockets and mortars, they levelled another third of the buildings in the city, leaving 75% of the original city ruined since the start of the war. Witold watched as around 15,000 of the rebels were killed and wounded, with approximately one million civilians killed or made homeless14. The Warsaw Uprising was large and desperate, but it failed and left the city gutted as the Red Army advanced with their own Polish Divisions. This time, Witold did not escape.
After the capitulation of the Uprising, Pilecki hid some weapons before once again walking out into the streets of Warsaw to surrender to the Wehrmacht. He was promptly sent to a number of POW Camps, this time in Silesia and Bavaria. Due to the nature of the war, his prison camp was soon liberated by the US 12th Army and he found the Polish II Corp. Knowing he would soon be redeployed, he wrote about his experiences in Auschwitz and the war (Which would later be translated into the Auschwitz Volunteer). The surrender of Germany did not lead to immediate peace, as the USSR put a Communist government in control of Poland, disregarding the Polish government-in-exile. Witold and the NIE’s fears were confirmed, as the government Britain had gone to war for was now thrown aside in order to avoid all-out war with the Soviet Union. The Allies wanted to know what was happening in the new Poland, and once again Witold was ordered to investigate by his intelligence chief in the Polish II Corps. In December 1945, Witold started organising intelligence networks within Poland and report on the military and political situation in
12 Auschwitz.org. 2020. News / Museum / Auschwitz-Birkenau. 13 Encyclopedia.ushmm.org. 2020. The Warsaw Polish Uprising. 14 Encyclopedia.ushmm.org. 2020. The Warsaw Polish Uprising.
4 Peter O’Neill – Witold Pilecki the secretive state. Working with old allies from the Secert Polish Army and Auschwitz, he worked in various roles, under many names but soon the communist secret police (MBP) discovered his true identity.
Witold during his for his trial15
The Game Was Finally Up
On the 3rd of March, 1948, the figure of Witold Pilecki mounted a pulpit in a small courtroom, and awaited his own show trial. All of his great deeds, his service for Poland, was to be taken away by his own countrymen, under the façade of justice. Witold had suffered interrogation and torture from some of the most savage men the Soviets had to offer. Witold gave away nothing and never lost his pride. The ‘jury’, with pre-decided verdicts, found him guilty of illegally-crossing borders, carrying weapons, espionage, conspiracy to assassinate and working with the Polish government-in-exile. Witold denied the charges of espionage and assassination, but it made no difference to his sentence. He was sentenced to death in May 1948, and on the 15th, he was shot in the back of the head in a small, dark room in the infamous Mokotów Prison.16
Legacy of Witold Pilecki
For nearly four decades after his death, little was known about Pilecki. His deeds, his life and his death were all covered up by the communist regime that reigned from 1947 until the fall of the USSR in 1989. Thanks to Auschwitz survivors and researchers, his true story came to light. Witold rose and fell with the 2nd Polish Republic: he was there for its birth and for its death, he fought in nearly every battle that shaped the country and played a pivotal role in keeping the dream of independence alive in the darkest days. Witold did everything he could to help those around him: his local community in
15 By Unknown author - "Głos Ludu" March 1948, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2140404 16 En.wikipedia.org. 2020. Mokotów Prison.
5 Peter O’Neill – Witold Pilecki
Lida, his country in 1939, the inmates in Auschwitz and even near-strangers in Warsaw. One of my favourite stories I found during my research was that of Igor Newerly17, a Polish poet and author, who was an inmate in Auschwitz with Witold. Newerly’s wife was helping Jews in Warsaw, but was being blackmailed by a fellow Pole, threatening to tell the Germans about her apparent Jewish heritage. When Witold broke out of the camp, he found Mrs Newerly, provided her with funds to pay off her blackmailer and to keep herself safe. But, soon after, the blackmailer disappeared, likely dealt with by the Home Army. Michael Schudrich, the current Chief Rabbi of Poland, spoke about Witold Pilecki and said he was:
“an example of inexplicable goodness at a time of inexplicable evil. There is ever-growing awareness of Poles helping Jews in the Holocaust, and how they paid with their lives, like Pilecki. We must honour these examples and follow them today in the parts of the world where there are horrors again.”18
Witold Pilecki was fearless, that is undeniable. Not in an ignorant or foolhardy way, but in a brave and patriotic sense. While some of his more extreme comrades started looking for people to blame for the fall of Poland, blaming everything from weak leaders to the lack of Catholics, Witold focused on ways to end the occupation. This attitude made him few friends in the resistance. During his brief operation in Communist Poland, he observed the Kielce Pogrom. Polish soldiers, officers and civilians struck out in an anti-Semitic attack on a number of Jewish refugees, killing thirty-seven. Witold saw the event as ‘a tragedy’ to the Polish-Government in exile. Wanting to find someone to blame for your own pain is the surest path to hatred, and sadly similar attacks and pogroms occurred all over the USSR in years to follow. After receiving his death penalty in a Polish court, with a Polish Jury, he said:
“I have been trying to live my life so that in the hour of my death I would feel joy, rather than fear”19
Two and a half years inside Auschwitz gave Pilecki a different view on death. 47 years old, he died partly because of his refusal to renounce his loyalty to the legitimate Polish government. His name and those of so many others taken in Mokotów were buried or twisted, with countless Polish war heroes being treated as traitors in their own land. Paranoia and fear ruled supreme over the Eastern Bloc, with those who had fought with the ‘westerners’ seen as too dangerous to be kept alive. Pilots in the RAF, refugees who fought in Italy and freedom fighters were all treated with the utmost suspicion, with most ending up as outcasts in foreign lands or dead on their own soil. Thankfully, in recent years, thousands have been remembered and given decent funerals and burials. After the collapse of the Communist regime, a large cenotaph was placed in Ostrów Mazowiecka cemetery in honour of Witold Pilecki and attempts were made to locate his remains. In 1995, Witold was posthumously awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta before receiving the highest honour possible: the Order of the White Eagle in 2006. In 2012, the humble cavalry officer became a Colonel20.
“Those who looked death bravely in the eye were usually not chosen.” ― Witold Pilecki, from the book The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery
Bibliography
17 En.wikipedia.org. 2020. Igor Newerly. 18 Pilecki, W. and Garlinski, J., 2012. The Auschwitz Volunteer. Aquila Polonica Publishing, p.xv. 19 "Ale Historia", in Gazeta Wyborcza, 22 April 2013 20 En.wikipedia.org. 2020. Witold Pilecki.
6 Peter O’Neill – Witold Pilecki
"Ale Historia", in Gazeta Wyborcza, 22 April 2013
Auschwitz.org. 2020. History / Auschwitz-Birkenau. [online] Available at:
Auschwitz.org. 2020. News / Museum / Auschwitz-Birkenau. [online] Available at:
Auschwitz.org. 2020. News / Museum / Auschwitz-Birkenau. [online] Available at:
Encyclopedia Britannica. 2020. NKVD | Soviet Agency. [online] Available at:
Encyclopedia Britannica. 2020. Poland - The Second Republic. [online] Available at:
Encyclopedia Britannica. 2020. Tsar. [online] Available at:
Encyclopedia.ushmm.org. 2020. The Warsaw Polish Uprising. [online] Available at:
En.wikipedia.org. 2020. Igor Newerly. [online] Available at:
En.wikipedia.org. 2020. Jan Włodarkiewicz. [online] Available at:
En.wikipedia.org. 2020. Mokotów Prison. [online] Available at:
En.wikipedia.org. 2020. Witold Pilecki. [online] Available at:
Jewishvirtuallibrary.org. 2020. The Mass Extermination Of Jews In German Occupied Poland. [online] Available at:
Pilecki, W. and Garlinski, J., 2012. The Auschwitz Volunteer. Aquila Polonica Publishing, p.xv.
Theholocaustexplained.org. 2020. Invasion Of Poland – The Holocaust Explained: Designed For Schools. [online] Available at:
Theholocaustexplained.org. 2020. Warsaw Ghetto – The Holocaust Explained: Designed For Schools. [online] Available at:
7 Peter O’Neill – Witold Pilecki
8