Captain Witold Pilecki (1901–1948)

Witold Pilecki was born in Karelia, Russia, to a patriotic Polish family that had been forcibly resettled by the Russian authorities for their participation in the failed January Uprising of 1863-1864. In 1910, his mother took him and his siblings to Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania), where he joined the secret Polish Scout Movement. At the end of World War I, Poland gained its independence but had to keep fighting for its borders. Pilecki joined the voluntary self-defense units in the Vilnius area and took part in the Battle of Warsaw during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920. He finally graduated from high school and began studies at Stefan Batory University, but had to drop out due to financial difficulties. He became an administrator of his family farm in present-day Belarus, a social worker, and a member of the 26th Greater Polish Cavalry Regiment. In 1931, he married Maria Ostrowska, a schoolteacher, with whom he had two children. At the start of World War II, he fought with the regular army against the German invasion; but after the occupation of his country, he helped found the Secret Polish Army. In 1940, he volunteered to be smuggled into the concentration camp at Auschwitz under a false name to organize a resistance movement there and gather intelligence on conditions. He wrote three reports about the camp for the Polish government-in-exile, describing first-hand its function as a Nazi killing machine. An English translation of his third and most comprehensive report, hidden for decades in Communist files, was published in 2012 as a book entitled The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery. In 1943, after spending 945 days in Auschwitz, he escaped with two other prisoners. In 1944, Pilecki was captured while fighting in the Warsaw Uprising and spent the rest of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp. He rejoined the Free Polish troops in Italy in 1945 and agreed to return to Poland to collect intelligence on the Soviet takeover of the country. He was arrested by the Polish Communist regime, tortured, and executed in 1948.