There is no way to adequately prepare a reader for what Witold Pilecki chose to do. In September 1940, with Auschwitz already established and operational for four months, Pilecki asked his commanding officer in the Polish resistance for permission to get himself arrested.
He wanted to go inside.
His reasoning was precise. Auschwitz was taking Polish political prisoners in large numbers. No one had any reliable intelligence about what was happening there. His unit, the Polish Secret Army (Tajna Armia Polska), needed intelligence. And so Rotmistrz (Cavalry Captain) Witold Pilecki, 39 years old, a husband and father of two, arranged to walk through a German roundup operation in Warsaw on September 19, 1940, was arrested, processed, and transported on the second transport to arrive at Auschwitz.
He was assigned the number 4859.
What He Found and What He Built
Pilecki began his intelligence work immediately. He organized a small resistance cell inside the camp, building a network that by 1942 included several hundred prisoners, organized into a five-man cell structure so that the exposure of one cell could not destroy the whole network. His cells organized mutual aid, smuggled food and medicine to the weakest prisoners, kept up communication with the outside world, and maintained morale with the specific understanding that the Polish Home Army intended to liberate the camp.
He documented what he saw. He wrote reports — smuggled out via a laundry truck, via contacts at the camp's women's section, via released prisoners who memorized content and recited it to underground contacts outside. By 1942, his reports had reached the Polish government-in-exile in London. They described, with the specificity of an eyewitness, what would in 1944 become known to the world as the Holocaust: systematic mass murder, gas chambers, crematoria, the selection process.
The Allied governments received these reports. Their response was, with some notable exceptions, either skepticism or inaction. The reports were too extreme to be believed by those who preferred not to believe them.
The Escape
By early 1943, Pilecki determined that the expected liberation was not coming, that his network was becoming increasingly compromised as the Gestapo expanded its network of informants inside the camp, and that his continued survival depended on escape. On the night of April 26–27, 1943, he escaped from the camp bakery — a detail he had been assigned to because it required him to work outside the main perimeter — cutting through fences and crossing open ground under fire.
He reached the Polish underground and submitted his most comprehensive report: a detailed account of nearly three years inside Auschwitz, documenting everything from the camp's physical layout to its administrative structure to the murder of Jews beginning in 1942. His 1943 report is one of the first comprehensive first-hand accounts of Auschwitz by someone who survived it.
Forgotten by the Country He Served
After the war, Pilecki volunteered to stay in Soviet-occupied Poland to gather intelligence for the Polish government-in-exile. He was arrested by the Polish communist security service in 1947. Under months of interrogation and torture, he would not recant his service to the non-communist underground.
He was tried for espionage, treason, and illegal border crossing. At his trial, he said: "I have tried to live my life in such a way that in the hour of my death I would rather feel gladness than fear."
He was executed by a pistol shot to the back of the head on May 25, 1948, in Warsaw's Mokotów Prison. He was 47 years old. The communists did not tell his family where he was buried. His grave was not found until 2013, when his remains were identified through DNA testing.
He was rehabilitated by the Polish state in 1990, following the fall of communism. In 2013, he was posthumously awarded Poland's highest military decoration, the Order of the White Eagle. Poland has built memorials to him. Streets bear his name.
The name he was given at Auschwitz — the number 4859 — is represented now only as an absence, the space where a name would have been before the machine that didn't succeed in erasing him was finally, after sixty-five years, made to stop.
Sources & Further Reading
Witold Pilecki, "The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery" (Aquila Polonica, 2012) — his own reports, translated by Jarek Garlinski; Marco Patricelli, "L'italiano che salvò gli ebrei di Roma" (comparison study); Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial archives.
