#polishhero Icon for Knowledge sharing dimension Knowledge sharing dimension · Follow Posted by Ernesto de Santis
9mo Witold Pilecki was born in 1901 to a noble Polish family in Olonec in the Republic of Karelia. At the age of 17 he enlisted in the Polish army, reaching the rank of lieutenant in the cavalry
At the outbreak of the Second World War he took part in the defense of Warsaw from Nazi troops and, after the capitulation of Poland, he continued to fight clandestinely in the ranks of the Polish resistance.
Later, having assumed the identity of Tomaz Serafinski, on September 19, 1940, with the permission of his superiors, he was arrested by the Gestapo and interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp: the purpose of his mission was to create a resistance movement within the camp and to transmit as much information as possible to the Allies.
Just a month later he managed to have his reports leaked, first to the Polish military command in exile, who then forwarded them to the British, who, however, considered the report "exaggerated".
On June 20, 1942, further important information gathered by Pilecki emerged from Auschwitz thanks to the courageous escape of four prisoners.
After almost 1,000 days of captivity and surviving the terrible conditions of the camp, on the night between April 26 and 27, 1943, he managed to escape adventurously together with other prisoners.
He wrote his third and final report. He spoke of forced labor, insufficient food, sadistic punishments and the persecution of the Jews: 《I have said goodbye to everything I had known in this land until now and entered something that was no longer part of it》, 《Were we all… people?》, this was written between the lines of his reports and he added: «Nothing has been exaggerated: even the smallest lie would profane the memory of those worthy people who lost their lives there».
But this time too the British government did not move. In 1944 Pilecki took part in the Warsaw Uprising, once again fighting on the front lines against the Nazis. At the end of the war he joined General Władysław Anders in Italy, who commanded the Polish II Corps, which fought in Italy alongside the British and US armies.
After the war he returned to Poland, which this time was under the communist regime and a violent process of sovietization, this time with the task of searching, under a false name and by infiltrating the regime's authorities, for evidence of the fraud in the 1946 referendum (on the political force that was to govern the country), but he was discovered and thus met his fate: in 1947 he was arrested by the communist secret police, tortured, tried and sentenced to death thanks to false evidence.
He was executed with a shot to the back of the head in a prison cell in Warsaw on May 25, 1948; his body was buried in a secret location.
Pilecki's family was forbidden to remember their relative in any way, all information about him and his actions was classified and censored by the communist regime. Only in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was his memory rehabilitated.
On 19 September 2019, the European Parliament established every 25 May a day for the memory of Pilecki, a hero who opposed all types of totalitarianism.
The metal group Sabaton dedicated a song to him: Inmate 4859.
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Ernesto de Santis
9mo
Witold Pilecki was born in 1901 to a noble Polish family in Olonec in the Republic of Karelia. At the age of 17 he enlisted in the Polish army, reaching the rank of lieutenant in the cavalry
At the outbreak of the Second World War he took part in the defense of Warsaw from Nazi troops and, after the capitulation of Poland, he continued to fight clandestinely in the ranks of the Polish resistance.
Later, having assumed the identity of Tomaz Serafinski, on September 19, 1940, with the permission of his superiors, he was arrested by the Gestapo and interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp: the purpose of his mission was to create a resistance movement within the camp and to transmit as much information as possible to the Allies.
Just a month later he managed to have his reports leaked, first to the Polish military command in exile, who then forwarded them to the British, who, however, considered the report "exaggerated".
On June 20, 1942, further important information gathered by Pilecki emerged from Auschwitz thanks to the courageous escape of four prisoners.
After almost 1,000 days of captivity and surviving the terrible conditions of the camp, on the night between April 26 and 27, 1943, he managed to escape adventurously together with other prisoners.
He wrote his third and final report. He spoke of forced labor, insufficient food, sadistic punishments and the persecution of the Jews: 《I have said goodbye to everything I had known in this land until now and entered something that was no longer part of it》, 《Were we all… people?》, this was written between the lines of his reports and he added: «Nothing has been exaggerated: even the smallest lie would profane the memory of those worthy people who lost their lives there».
But this time too the British government did not move. In 1944 Pilecki took part in the Warsaw Uprising, once again fighting on the front lines against the Nazis. At the end of the war he joined General Władysław Anders in Italy, who commanded the Polish II Corps, which fought in Italy alongside the British and US armies.
After the war he returned to Poland, which this time was under the communist regime and a violent process of sovietization, this time with the task of searching, under a false name and by infiltrating the regime's authorities, for evidence of the fraud in the 1946 referendum (on the political force that was to govern the country), but he was discovered and thus met his fate: in 1947 he was arrested by the communist secret police, tortured, tried and sentenced to death thanks to false evidence.
He was executed with a shot to the back of the head in a prison cell in Warsaw on May 25, 1948; his body was buried in a secret location.
Pilecki's family was forbidden to remember their relative in any way, all information about him and his actions was classified and censored by the communist regime. Only in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was his memory rehabilitated.
On 19 September 2019, the European Parliament established every 25 May a day for the memory of Pilecki, a hero who opposed all types of totalitarianism.
The metal group Sabaton dedicated a song to him: Inmate 4859.
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