Witold Pilecki: the man who volunteered for Auschwitz

In September 1940 a Polish officer stood in a Warsaw street and waited to be caught. The Germans were rounding up men for a new camp near the town of Oświęcim, and nobody in the underground knew what happened inside it. Witold Pilecki went to find out. He spent more than two and a half years in Auschwitz, organized resistance among the prisoners, sent reports to Warsaw, and walked out again by his own plan. He survived the Germans. He did not survive the Polish communists, who shot him eight years later and hid his body.²

Early life

Pilecki was born on 13 May 1901 in Olonets (Ołoniec), in Russian Karelia, where his father, Julian, worked as a forester. The family belonged to the Polish gentry of the Nowogródek region and was in Russia because of the January Uprising of 1863: Witold's grandfather, Józef, had been exiled to Siberia for his part in it and the family estates were partly confiscated. In 1910 his mother took the children to Wilno (Vilnius).³

In Wilno he went to the Joachim Lelewel gymnasium and, at thirteen, joined the clandestine Polish scouting movement, banned under Russian rule. Scouting shaped him for life. During World War I the family moved deeper into Russia, and in 1917 he was photographed with a Polish scout troop in Oryol on the Oka.⁴

The wars of 1918 to 1920

On 20 December 1918, with a group of fellow scouts, the seventeen-year-old joined the Polish self-defense units that took over Wilno on New Year's Eve. When the Red Army pushed them out on the night of 5 to 6 January 1919, he rode with the cavalry detachment of the brothers Władysław and Jerzy Dąbrowski, the second of them famous as "Łupaszka." The unit grew into the 13th Uhlan Regiment, and through 1919 Pilecki fought in most of its battles, among them Lida, Baranowicze and Minsk. In the autumn he was demobilized and went back to school.⁵

In July 1920, with the Bolshevik armies marching on Warsaw, he enlisted again. On 12 August he joined the 211th Uhlan Regiment and fought at Płock, Mława and Chorzele during the Battle of Warsaw, then further east at Druskieniki and Stołpce. In October he rode with General Lucjan Żeligowski's expedition to Wilno, and on 1 January 1921 the senior uhlan was released to finish his education. He had been awarded the Cross of Valor twice.⁶ › Battle of Warsaw, 1920

Sukurcze and the reserves

Back in civilian life he studied fine art at Stefan Batory University in Wilno, but the family's money troubles forced him to give it up. In 1926 the Pileckis recovered their ruined estate at Sukurcze, near Lida, and Witold rebuilt it into a working dairy and farm. He painted, wrote poetry, played the piano and organized pre-military training for local young men. Two of his paintings hung in the church at nearby Krupa.⁷

The army kept its hold on him. In 1926 he became a second lieutenant of the reserve, attached to the 26th Greater Poland Uhlan Regiment at Baranowicze, and went on its exercises almost every year, from 1931 also at the Cavalry Training Center in Grudziądz. On 7 April 1931 he married Maria Ostrowska, a young schoolteacher from Krupa. Their son, Andrzej, was born in 1932 and their daughter, Zofia, in 1933.⁸

September 1939

When Germany invaded in September 1939, Pilecki fought in the cavalry squadron of the 19th Infantry Division of the Prusy Army, around Piotrków and Tomaszów Mazowiecki. After the division was broken near Wolbórz he crossed the Vistula and joined the 41st Infantry Division forming near Włodawa, as second-in-command to its cavalry chief, Major Jan Włodarkiewicz. That division was defeated on 22 September, but Pilecki and his uhlans fought on as partisans until 17 October.⁹

In occupied Warsaw the two officers kept going. On 9 November 1939, in the flat of Pilecki's sister-in-law, Eleonora Ostrowska, they founded the Secret Polish Army (Tajna Armia Polska, TAP), and took its oath the next day. Włodarkiewicz became commander and Pilecki, already living under the name Tomasz Serafiński, its chief of staff. TAP was later merged into the Union of Armed Struggle, the forerunner of the Home Army.¹⁰

Into Auschwitz

In 1940 the Germans opened a camp for Polish prisoners at Oświęcim, renamed Auschwitz. Pilecki proposed to go in, gather intelligence and build resistance there, and the commander of the Union of Armed Struggle, General Stefan Rowecki, agreed. On 19 September 1940 he let himself be seized in a round-up in the Żoliborz district, still carrying the Serafiński papers. He arrived in the camp on the night of 21 to 22 September and was registered as prisoner 4859. The Pilecki Institute calls him the only volunteer to Auschwitz.¹¹

His first message from the camp, describing its conditions, reached Warsaw in October 1940. Inside, he built his organization from small cells of five men who did not know the other cells. The first group was the Secret Military Organization; as other groups joined, it became the Union of Military Organization (Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, ZOW), with members in every labor detail and, by 1942, over 500 people. It shared food, found lighter work for the weakest, placed men in the hospital and the offices, and documented German crimes. Pilecki fell seriously ill three times, and kept going.¹²

Reports went out first with released prisoners and later with the organization's own couriers. In June 1942 an escapee, Stanisław Gustaw Jaster, carried a Pilecki report to Home Army headquarters. Over three years Pilecki passed on at least ten reports; through the government in exile in London they reached the Allies, who did little with them. He called the camp a giant mill "processing people into dust."¹³

The escape and the plan

By the spring of 1943 the Gestapo was closing in on the camp underground, and the SS had begun shipping older Polish prisoners to camps inside the Reich. Pilecki decided to leave. Over Easter, on the night of 26 to 27 April 1943, he escaped with two younger prisoners, Jan Redzej and Edward Ciesielski. Of the 928 prisoners known to have tried to escape from Auschwitz, only 196 are known to have succeeded.¹⁴

The three men hid around Bochnia and Nowy Wiśnicz. There, by chance, Pilecki met the real Tomasz Serafiński, whose name he had carried through the camp, and who offered him shelter. In Wiśnicz he wrote a report on the camp and a plan to free it by force. The local Home Army command suspected the escapees of being a German provocation. The garrison numbered over 3,000 men, and planners reckoned that partisans could hold the camp for perhaps half an hour, long enough for 200 to 300 prisoners to get away. The plan was shelved, to be used only if the Germans moved to kill the prisoners en masse.¹⁵

On 22 August 1943 Pilecki reached Warsaw. General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski promoted him to cavalry captain (rotmistrz). He served with the Home Army's sabotage directorate, Kedyw, and in 1944 was assigned to the deep-cover organization NIE, prepared to keep fighting after the Red Army arrived. He also looked after the families of Auschwitz prisoners and sent them parcels.¹⁶ › The Greatest Escapes in Military History

Witold's Redoubt

When the Warsaw Uprising broke out on 1 August 1944, NIE officers were supposed to stay out of it. Pilecki hid his rank and joined the Chrobry II battalion as a private. As the fighting went on he revealed who he was, became deputy commander and then commander of the 2nd company of its 1st battalion, and held a sector in Wola around Towarowa, Pańska and Żelazna Streets and Starynkiewicz Square. His strongpoint, centered on a building at the corner of Starynkiewicz Square and Jerusalem Avenue, became known as Witold's Redoubt (Reduta Witolda). It was one of the longest-held insurgent positions, and the Germans never took it.¹⁷ › The Warsaw Uprising, 1944

After the capitulation on 5 October 1944 he went into captivity with his men, through the transit camp at Ożarów to Stalag Lamsdorf (Łambinowice) and then the officers' camp at Murnau in Bavaria. American troops freed Murnau on 28 April 1945. On 9 July he left with a group of officers for Italy and joined the Polish 2nd Corps two days later.¹⁸

How he led

Pilecki was not a general and never commanded large formations. His gift was organization under the worst conditions imaginable. In Auschwitz he built a network in which each cell of five knew only its own members, so that one arrest could not unravel the rest, and he brokered a working agreement among prisoners from rival political camps. He described the purpose of it all as saving his comrades' lives, which meant first of all food, work and medical help, and only then the military side: intelligence and the readiness to rise if the camp was to be liquidated.¹⁹

He combined daring with discipline. He volunteered for the most dangerous mission of the war, yet accepted his superiors' decision not to attack the camp. In the Uprising he gave up his rank rather than break orders, then took command when the fighting needed him. He was also a painter, poet and photographer, and the IPN quotes his own explanation of how he tried to live: "I tried to live my life in such a way that at the hour of my death I would rather rejoice than fear."²⁰

Return, arrest and death

In Italy Pilecki joined the intelligence section of the 2nd Corps and wrote the fullest version of his Auschwitz report. On the order of General Władysław Anders he went back to Poland, crossing on 22 October 1945 as "Roman Jezierski." In Warsaw he built a network that reported to the 2nd Corps on the NKVD and the Security Office, the terror, the armed underground, the rigging of elections and Soviet economic exploitation. In 1946 he was ordered to leave the country. He stayed, with his family and his work.²¹ › Władysław Anders

On 8 May 1947 the Security Office arrested him in an ambush at a friend's flat on Pańska Street. For almost a year he was held in the Mokotów prison on Rakowiecka Street and tortured in an investigation overseen by Colonel Józef Różański. After one interrogation he told his wife that compared with this, Auschwitz had been child's play.²²

The show trial of Pilecki and seven co-defendants opened before the Military District Court in Warsaw on 3 March 1948 and lasted nearly two weeks. They were convicted of espionage and treason. The court passed three death sentences; those of Maria Szelągowska and Tadeusz Płużański were commuted to life imprisonment, but President Bolesław Bierut refused clemency to Pilecki. He was shot in the back of the head in the Mokotów prison at 9.30 p.m. on 25 May 1948. His body was buried secretly, probably in the "Łączka" plot by the wall of the Powązki Military Cemetery.²³

Legacy and memory

In communist Poland his name was censored. His wife and children were stigmatized as the family of a traitor, and the house at Sukurcze, now inside the Soviet Union, was razed. Only in 1990 did the family learn the truth about his death. In September 1990 the Supreme Court acquitted him and his companions, finding the sentences unjust.²⁴

The honors came late. He was posthumously awarded the Auschwitz Cross in 1988, the Warsaw Uprising Cross in 1990, the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta in 1995 and, in July 2006, the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest decoration, from President Lech Kaczyński. In 2013 he was promoted to colonel. Since 2012 IPN teams under Professor Krzysztof Szwagrzyk have exhumed victims of the Mokotów prison from the Łączka plot, but Pilecki's remains have not been identified.²⁵

Today a state research institute, the Pilecki Institute, bears his name, monuments to him stand across Poland, and every 25 May, at the hour of his death, candles are lit at them. For Poles his story joins the two great tragedies of the century: he fought the German occupation from inside its worst camp, and he died at the hands of the regime that followed it.²⁶

Read more about the Warsaw Uprising in which he fought, his commander in Italy, Władysław Anders, the Battle of Warsaw of 1920, the greatest commanders in Polish history, or what happened on 1 August, the day the Uprising began.