Witold Pilecki’s Heroism in the Face of Unspeakable Evil
I am expected to describe bare facts only, as my colleagues want it. It was said: “The more strictly you will adhere to nothing but facts, relating them without comments, the more valuable it will be. So, I will try… but we were not made of wood… not to say of stone. . . .
We were not made of stone – I was often jealous of it – our hearts were beating – often in our throats
First sentences of Witold Pilecki’s Report on his experiences at Auschwitz
The Industrial Revolution brought about unprecedented surpluses and cheap new consumer goods significantly raising the standard of living across Europe and the US. But these innovations had a dark side. Novel efficiencies could be applied to any endeavor. Machine guns, endless artillery barrages and high death tolls also became features of the Industrial Revolution. As devastating as war making could be, it was not the darkest application. Events of the 20th century demonstrated mechanization and efficiency could be harnessed for far more horrific purposes.
There is no way to discuss the Holocaust without addressing disturbing aspects of human depravity and cruelty magnified by new capabilities and efficiencies of industrial societies: mass murder, sickeningly emaciated skeletons, Nazi racial policies. Yet, we must remember the Holocaust and the gory details in the hope of preventing another genocide. The Nazis created a well-ordered system designed to squeeze every ounce of productivity from a slave labor force and then efficiently dispose of the drained workers. The Nazis created a “Final Solution” to eliminate those who did not meet their depraved, pseudo-scientific genetic “Arayan” profile. They scientifically tested means of execution and efficient methods of cremation to wipe out as many Jews and other “untermenschen” (sub-humans) as quickly as possible.
Yet in the face of this evil, there were individuals who fought back demonstrating countervailing qualities of courage, resilience and decency. The death toll of the Holocaust is staggering and the humanity of the victims can be lost in such enormous figures. The individual stories provide context, details and color to ensure the human element of these crimes does not become lost in statistics.
What follows is not a comprehensive account of the Holocaust, but the recollections of one very unique participant. Of the 1.3 million individuals imprisoned and/or murdered at Auschwitz, only one person volunteered to go. His name was Witold Pilecki. He endured brutal treatment as an inmate for 972 days from 1940 to 1943. Pilecki entered the mouth of Hell to report the atrocities to a wider world in the hopes of ending it. He provided an unflinching account, in the process revealing his unrelenting courage in confronting one of the greatest crimes in human history. The account is astonishing and depressing and yet inspiring and humbling. Pilecki’s unsurpassed bravery and sacrifice is worthy of being honored, remembered and re-told.
Witold Pilecki was born in Russia to a Polish family forced to migrate away from their native land a generation earlier. He grew up in a patriotic home and as a young man fought with the Whites against the communist Reds in the Russian Civil War. After the Reds prevailed, Pilecki moved to his family’s ancestral home in newly independent Poland, got married and became a community leader. He founded a cavalry school in 1932 which was eventually absorbed into the Polish military. When World War II began on September 1, 1939, Pilecki deployed with units opposing the Germans. The Soviet Union invaded weeks later and Pilecki’s unit fought in vain to stop the Russians. Evading capture, Pilecki hid in German held Warsaw establishing the Secret Polish Army, a regional resistance group. The Germans were randomly arresting Poles without charge and imprisoning them indefinitely. Little was known about the prison camps except that conditions were terrible. Pilecki volunteered to be captured to set up a resistance movement, bolster the internees’ morale, and plot a breakout. He soon discovered the plight of Polish internees was far worse than imagined.
Volunteering for Imprisonment and Arrival at Auschwitz
On September 19, 1940, Pilecki walked into a Warsaw street as German soldiers rounded up civilians guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When arrested, Pilecki gave the false name of Tomasz Serafínski to protect his family. The Germans sometimes arrested relatives of previously incarcerated Poles. Two days later, the Germans transported their prisoners in trucks previously laden with lime. The drive lasted all day and the Poles received no food or water inhaling suffocating lime dust along the way.
That night the trucks finally stopped and the locked doors opened to blinding lights. The Poles were yanked out of the truck by SS guards delivering blows with rifles and kicking those who fell. The guards laughed as vicious guard dogs tore into the captives. Driven forward, still blinded, Pileski heard several machine gun bursts as guards shot ten prisoners moving in the wrong direction.
The Poles approached a gate with the words “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes you free) emblazoned above. Men in striped uniforms with armbands assailed the new prisoners as they entered with sticks, punches and kicks. Pilecki later learned these “kapos” were other collaborating inmates. They were as cruel and heartless as the SS men. The kapos and SS men began questioning the Poles about their professions. Those with education or spiritual authority such as priests were beaten to death and/or shot on the spot.
Kapos directed the new inmates to a building where they were sprayed down with cold water. They stripped, had their heads shaved and were given loose blue and white striped denim pants, shirts and wooden clogs to wear. They then received a cloth number. Pilecki made the mistake of carrying his number in his hand rather following the instruction to carry it in his teeth. An SS guard hit him in the face with his rifle butt knocking out two of Pilecki’s teeth. From that moment Pilecki and his fellow inmates no longer had names, they were numbers. Pilecki became 4859. Each prisoner also received a colored triangle which denoted their “crime.” The triangles came in five colors. Political offenders wore red, criminals – green, “those despising work in the Third Reich” black, Bible Students violet, and homosexuals pink.
Next, the guards divided prisoners into groups to be assigned to a specific dormitory (block). Upon arriving at his block, Pilecki met his block kapo whom the inmates nicknamed “Bloody Alois. This man took pleasure in delivering beatings with a stick for the slightest infractions. The inmates lay down side by side on a straw mattress on the floor, finally allowed to sleep.
Witold Pilecki had just entered Auschwitz.
Daily Life at Auschwitz
In a typical day, a gong awakened the prisoners at 4:20 am. They hustled to get dressed and then run to the latrine and then wash under outdoor pumps. Anyone who moved too slowly Bloody Alois delivered a beating. Breakfast came next: warmed dirty water, tea, or thin soup and sometimes bread. With little solid food, many prisoners soon developed swelling from too much liquid and backbreaking physical labor. Pilecki learned to save what food he had and limit his intake of liquids to moderate the constant hunger and prevent swelling.
Early on Pilecki pushed wheelbarrows of gravel from a pit to a construction site, that he later learned was a crematorium. Work days lasted 12 hours with 90 minutes for lunch. Fortunately for Pilecki, his hearty physical condition allowed him to keep up with the work. Others did not fare as well. Those who moved too slowly or collapsed were beaten to death. The beatings created a brief interruption which Pilecki learned to use as a chance to rest. In spite of the conditions, Pilecki reported that he developed a “substitute [for] joy” in the opportunity to occupy his mind with work and not face the harsh discipline of the kapos and SS guards in the camp.
At 6:00 pm, the workday ended, but not the torture. The prisoners returned to the camp for roll call. Inmates carried the corpses of those murdered that day for roll call. The Germans were exacting, the roll call number in the evening had to be the same as in the morning. Sometimes the guards forced the inmates to stand at attention for long periods or engage in calisthenics. There was no purpose to the exercise other than continued sadism. The death continued as well. It was at this time in the day when many exhausted and broken prisoners made runs for the fence. They had no chance of escaping. They chose certain death over facing another day in Auschwitz.
Pilecki noted that the physical punishments were only part of torture: “Not only the gun butts of SS-men struck our heads – something more struck them also. . . . They tried to strike us most radically. To break us mentally as soon as possible.”
In spite of the high death toll, the number of prisoners remained constant. A continual flow of new inmates replaced the dead. Pilecki soon became a rare “old number.” He saw fewer and fewer prisoners with four-digit numbers. They were now well into five digits. Prisoners who entered the camp left through the crematorium chimney.
From the beginning, Pilecki sought out other prisoners to form a resistance group within the camp. He sometimes came across men he knew from the outside or other Polish military veterans. Pilecki organized the resistance into groups of five. He tried to recruit men from different blocks with different duties. At first the groups passed along information from the outside and grew its numbers. Later, resistance members who survived their first months managed to get less taxing jobs. Pilecki found work as a carpenter and later in the mail department. The resistance began using their jobs to increase the odds of surviving and make reports to the outside world.
Workers who maintained domesticated animals used to feed the SS guards could smuggle scraps of food intended for the animals to other prisoners (the animals ate better than the inmates). Food might also come from the tannery where workers scraped meat off skins of animals to be made into leather. By 1941, a few prisoners could be freed if their family knew someone influential or knew who to bribe. Pilecki wrote reports on the horrors of Auschwitz which freed detainees delivered to the outside world. Some prisoners worked in surrounding Polish towns and occasionally reports could be smuggled out to outside inhabitants as well. Pilecki’s reports were some of the first accounts of German atrocities. They made their way to the Polish Government in Exile in Britain where they were disseminated in the press.
Even with the clandestine food supply, conditions for most prisoners remained terrible. Pilecki described a common sight, weakened and emaciated inmates whom the prisoners called “muslims.” The term meant “a prisoner who was getting done for, weakened and could hardly walk. … a muslim – slightly swayed by winds… was a creature just on the brink between life and crematorium chimney.”
New Arrivals
Women also began arriving in 1941, housed in a separately constructed camp. “The women initially kept courageous, soon they lost the lustre of their eyes, smile of their lips and vigour of movements. Some of them still kept smiling, but more and more sadly. Their faces turned grey, animal hunger appeared in their eyes.” Pilecki noted female muslims became a common sight.
Jews also began arriving and they received the same rough treatment as Poles at first. Early in 1942, the Nazis removed Jewish inmates from the harshest duties for easier jobs with more food. The Jews wrote letters overseen by the SS with mandatory favorable descriptions of camp life. After 6 weeks of better treatment and letter writing, they were executed and cremated. Soon, large numbers of Jews began arriving from all over Europe. The unusual treatment of first set of Jews was nothing more than a propaganda campaign to trick other Jews into coming to concentration camps willingly.
Hereafter, treatment for Jews was different. Upon arriving with suitcases, many were immediately separated by gender for processing. They lined up, removed clothing and stepped into rooms that looked like shower rooms. The rooms were really gas chambers and once the locks clicked on the steel doors, Zyclon B seeped in through vents in the ceiling. After 10 minutes, inmates came in to remove the bodies to be carted to crematoria. Soon, Auschwitz processed an average of a 1,000 Jews a day, though Pilecki noted that as many as 6,000 or 7,000 might be murdered in a single day on occasion.
The executions of Jews did not begin at Auschwitz and other death camps. Deaths Head SS units followed Wehrmacht combat units. At first, they shot many Jews and untermenschen. Recognizing this process was time consuming and inefficient, they experimented with other methods such as “death wagons.” These trucks held a dozen or so victims locked in the back while the exhaust of the vehicle was pumped in to asphyxiate the passengers. Still not satisfied, Nazi planners settled on transporting Jews to centralized sites equipped to efficiently murder their victims and dispose of the bodies. The Nazis fine tuned the process by trying different chemicals before settling on Zyclon-B, a quick acting, cyanide based pesticide.
The possessions of the dead were separated. Jewelry, money and other valuables were supposed to become property of the Nazi state. Other possessions were collected for other use or burned. SS men and kapos secretly went through the suitcases and removed valuables. Many of the newly arrived Jews also brought food in their suitcases. Contraband, called “canada,” became the subject of camp-wide trade. Pilecki’s organization amassed stores of food and valuables for trade.
Changes Over Time
Over the course of 1942 and into 1943, conditions improved slightly for the Polish prisoners. They now had wooden slatted beds, better clothing (often taken from murdered Jews and painted with bright stripes), and more food. Additionally, the original kapos in 1940 and 1941 had been German criminals who tended to be tyrannical and cruel. By 1942, they were replaced were Polish kapos who relied on persuasion over beatings to maintain discipline. The SS guards had also become distracted by the lure of obtaining gold and valuables over continued sadism directed towards the inmates. Polish inmates now knew of SS corruption which they might reveal which gave the guards incentive to leave the prisoners alone.
With more stable conditions and more lax oversight, Pilecki’s resistance became more effective. The organization collected spare parts over 7 months and built a radio to make reports on conditions in the camp. The Germans tried in vain to discover the location of the radio, but never did. The resistance also fought back in creative ways. Soviet prisoners arrived in 1941 carrying a deadly strain of typhus which spread through lice infecting inmates and guards alike. Members of Pilecki’s organization began “to rear typhus louses and to set them free upon overcoats of SS-men.”
Escape
In 1943, the Germans transferred many Polish prisoners to new camps including many of Pilecki’s closest confidants. Attrition and typhus had taken other operatives. Faced with rebuilding his organization, Pilecki decided the time had come to escape. A member of the resistance reported that he could get away through an iron door in the bakery located outside the camp. Another resistance operative created a wrench in the machine room to unscrew the lock. Yet another operative created a fake typhus admission to get Pilecki out of his duties in the parcel room. Once in the hospital, Pilecki received forged documents transferring him to the baker’s block. Other resistance members obtained civilian clothes and money for the escape and safe houses were established outside the camp. The plan had to be executed quickly before the SS guards or kapos realized something was amiss.
On their first night in the bakery, Pilecki and two others unscrewed the lock slowly between the rounds of their two guards. With the lock finally removed, Pilecki and his two companions waited for the guards to be far enough away. They burst through the door running at full speed. Several shots were fired but no one was hit. The escapees dropped tobacco they had ground up into a fine snuff to throw off dogs from their trail.
Over the next few days, Pilecki and his comrades made their way overland with the assistance of a priest and local Polish inhabitants to a safehouse and then to Warsaw. Pilecki re-joined the resistance and proposed several plans to lead an attack on Auschwitz. The Polish resistance was sympathetic, but ultimately rejected the idea. They lacked sufficient numbers and arms to be certain of success. They also feared that even if successful, the Germans would retaliate against Poles living in the area creating a worse situation.
Pilecki remained in Warsaw and in 1944 volunteered to fight in the failed Warsaw Uprising. He was captured, but the Germans did not know he was an Auschwitz fugitive so they placed him in another POW camp where he remained until liberated by the Soviets in 1945.
Post War Career and Death
After the war, Pilecki opposed Soviet intentions to make Poland a communist puppet satellite. He provided intelligence to the British from Warsaw. The communist state police captured Pilecki in 1947 and unsuccessfully tortured him for information and the names of other anti-communists. In 1948, the Polish communist government tried and convicted Pilecki for espionage and sentenced him to death. The charges were a pretext. Pilecki’s prosecution was one of thousands perpetrated to eliminate any resistance to Stalin’s puppet communist state. On May 25, 1948, a guard shot Pilecki in the basement of Mokotow Prison and buried in an unmarked grave. His last words were fitting: “Long live free Poland.”
Because of his post war activities, the Polish communist government repressed Pilecki’s heroism for 50 years. The fall of the communist regime in 1989 finally brought about the attention Pilecki deserved. The newly elected democratic government rehabilitated Pilecki posthumously absolving him of all charges and promoting him to colonel. He received the Order of Polonia Restituta in recognition for outstanding contributions to Polish national defense and the Order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish award for heroic contributions to Polish independence.
Few European nations have suffered as much as Poland did in the 20th century. Throughout their history, the Poles have struggled to maintain independence. Partitioned by the Austrians, Prussians and Russians 1795, Poland was reborn in 1918. Only 21 years later though Germany and the Soviet Union brutally absorbed Poles again. The Poles received no respite after World War II as the Soviets installed a repressive communist government. Only in 1989 with the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact did Poles finally regain their independence. Today it is a free nation and if there is a bright spot to this story, it is that Witold Pilecki’s dying wish for a free Poland has finally come to fruition. Further, his accounts have provided a valuable firsthand account of Nazi atrocities. Pilecki’s story and that of his homeland demonstrate the lengths and risks sometimes necessary to face up to the dark side of humanity and the need to jealously guard our freedoms to prevent a repeat of tragedies like the Holocaust.
I have detailed some of Pilecki’s experiences as they provide insight into the depravity that occurred. I cannot describe everything, his own account is over 100 pages not including more from the reports he supplied while imprisoned. I do recommend that you read Pilecki’s own words:
http://witoldsreport.blogspot.com/2008/05/volunteer-for-auschwitz-report-by.html
Sources:
Pilecki, Witold, The Auschwitz Report. 1945. http://witoldsreport.blogspot.com/2008/05/volunteer-for-auschwitz-report-by.html
The United States Holocaust Museum. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005189
Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1989.
David Cesarani, The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation. New York: Routledge, 1994.
All photographs courtesy of Wikipedia. All images are part of the public domain and subject to Fair Use Laws.
Wonderful recounting of horrors if Holaucost! So sad to think neoNazism and anti-denationalized are rising again in our USA! With my married name of Schlein I have come to be more and more aware of just how much anti-sensation is increasing. So happy our President moved our embassy to Jerusalem. Israel is one of our closest allies and new alliances are being formed against Iranian aggression and backing of terrorist groups!
A powerful article. I would add that the other main “untermenschen” group, killed in the tens of millions, were Slavs. Gypsies were also targeted, and figures for their deaths range from a few hundred thousand to one-and-a-half million. Nor should we forget that the readiness to murder certain ethnic groups wasn’t spontaneous but had been carefully cultivated for years through intense propaganda – propaganda in which the “terrorist” brand played a leading role. I was struck by Pilecki’s statement in court after he had been sentenced to death (from the Wiki article on him): I’ve been trying to live my… Read more »
Wow, great reference to a Persian poem. I saw that quote and had it in my rough draft but had to decide between that one and “Long live free Poland” which seemed to fit better because Poland has finally become an independent nation. Thanks for posting your comment.
A powerful account of such a dark period in history. The strength of such a “Mensch” through his choices and actions are an example for following generations.
Omitting the more vile details lends to a more valuable presentation in the theater of the mind. Thank you for sharing and keeping his story alive.
Thanks for taking the time to read my article and post your comment. I learned about Pilecki compiling daily events and thought what I read was exaggerated at first. Pilecki’s courage deserves to be remembered and re-told widely and often.
Kocham Cię mój bracie … My Polacy zawsze byliśmy i będziemy jak Lwy . Odnajdziemy Cie i pochowamy z honorami . Cześć i chwała bohaterom !
Translation of above quote to English: “I love you my brother … We Poles have always been and will be like Lions. We will find you and bury you with honors. Honor and glory to the heroes”
Reply: “Bóg honor i ojczyzna” (God, Honor, Fatherland). Poland Forever!