Witold Pilecki, the man who volunteered to be sent to Auschwitz then escaped
MOST people had no choice about being sent to Auschwitz but Witold Pilecki volunteered, stayed for two years then he escaped.
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MOST people had no choice about being sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. But one Polish man, going by the name Tomasz Serafinski, went there voluntarily, yet even he had his limit. After enduring more than two years in the camp, on April 27, 1943, 75 years ago today, he made his escape.
He and several other fellow prisoners got jobs working the night shift in the Auschwitz bakery, outside the main camp. They made a break for it through the back door of the bakery when the guard was otherwise engaged and escaped into the night.
Serafinski, who real name was Witold Pilecki, then made his way to the headquarters of the Tajna Armia Polska, or TAP the secret underground Polish resistance army, and reported on what he had seen. He also had a plan for attacking the compound, assisted by an uprising from within, that would liberate the internees.
Although his plan was rejected, a decision he accepted as a loyal founding member of the TAP, he had provided vital inside information on what the Germans were doing in the concentration camps. He would become known as the only person known to voluntarily enter Auschwitz and then escape, and his evidence of Nazi brutality would stand as testament to their inhumanity.
While he spent the rest of the war patriotically fighting the Germans, at the end he fell victim of the Soviet-backed communist regime of Poland. He was put on trial for espionage and sentenced to death.
Born in 1901 in Karelia, in the Russian Empire, Pilecki had Polish ancestry. His grandfather had been forcibly resettled in Karelia after he had taken part in the Polish nationalist uprising against Russia. His family later moved to Wilno (Vilnius) in Lithuania.
When war broke out in 1914 he joined a Polish-run scouting group and in 1918 joined a militia unit defending Wilno against the Soviet Red Army. When the communists overran the city Pilecki became part of a resistance movement, but in 1919 volunteered for Poland’s army fighting against the Soviets.
He remained in the army reserves through the ’20s and ’30s, moving up the ranks and helping to organise and train Poland’s forces, while also working on his family estate. In 1931 he married Maria Ostrowska and started a family.
In the lead-up to World War II he was mobilised as a rotmistrz — a captain in the cavalry. When the Germans and Soviets invaded Poland in 1939 he took part in the fighting and was wounded. When the Polish government surrendered to Germany, he and other like-minded officers went into hiding and organised the formation of TAP.
When several of his comrades were captured by the Germans and taken to Auschwitz he proposed a plan to go inside to see what happened to them and to organise resistance units inside the prison camp.
He volunteered for the mission and in September 1940, while hiding out at a safe house — the flat of a woman named Eleonora Ostrowska — he found identity papers belonging to Serafinski. Sticking his own photo on them he adopted the new identity. During a Nazi roundup he presented himself to the Germans using the false papers. As he left the flat he whispered to Ostrowska to let TAP know that he had “fulfilled the order”.
He was herded into a railway carriage and shipped off to Auschwitz along with hundreds of other Polish men, including Wladyslaw Bartoszewski who would later become foreign minister in Poland. At the camp he experienced some of the worst of Nazi brutality. He smuggled out two reports on the camp telling of the various forms of cruelty, torture and the summary executions meted out to the inmates, as well as the first uses of gas to kill prisoners.
For 2½ years he survived conditions at Auschwitz, waiting for the possibility that TAP or the Allied forces might organise an attack on the prison. But after some of his closest collaborators were executed in 1943 he realised that his own life was in danger. So he hatched his plan to escape.
He rejoined TAP and in 1944 took part in the Polish Uprising against the Germans, only to end up in a POW camp, which was liberated by the Americans in 1945. He then joined the Polish army that had assisted the US and the British against the Germans, agreeing to return to the now Soviet-controlled Poland to report on conditions under the communists for the Polish government in exile.
He organised an intelligence network but in 1947 was arrested by Soviet secret police and charged with espionage. Once again a prisoner, he was tortured and beaten, but held himself with composure and dignity during the show trial organised by the communists in 1948.
This time there was no escape. He was sentenced to death and on May 25, 1948, was executed.
His burial place was unknown, as the Soviets tried to erase evidence that he existed, but he is now revered as a hero around the world.
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