Inmate 4859: The Spy Who Volunteered to Be Imprisoned in Auschwitz

In the entirety of the Second World War, there was perhaps no place quite so dark as Auschwitz. It was a death camp, one that claimed the lives of some 1.1 million Jews, Poles, Romani, and Soviet prisoners of war by means of gassing, starvation, execution, medical experimentation, and more. The infernal brainchild of Nazi officer Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz ranked among the most brutal expressions of Nazi ideology, and gained a reputation for unbelievable, comprehensive cruelty toward the people whose lives it was designed to end.

Consider a thought exercise. Picture the Auschwitz concentration camp in all its horror, the unbelievable pain and suffering that went on there, and now picture making the decision to try and stop it, all by yourself, by willfully being captured and interned there in order to carry out a mission. If you cannot fathom mustering the courage it would take to walk into one of humanity’s darkest chapters, no one could blame you. But that is exactly what one Witold Pilecki did.

This is the story of Pilecki’s daring mission to infiltrate Auschwitz: how he did it, what he experienced inside the camp, how he managed to escape and bring word of the camp to the Western Allies, and how he was ultimately rewarded for his trouble with a bullet to the back of the head.

In Defense of Poland

By the summer of 1939, the entire world understood that Europe was on the brink. Nazi Germany’s supreme leader, Adolf Hitler, had long since crossed from a curious, nastily eccentric figure into a hateful, warmongering tyrant, and it had become crystal-clear that his vision for Germany extended far beyond the German border. Outmanned and outgunned in any hypothetical brawl with Nazi Germany, Hitler’s next-door neighbors in Poland were dismayed to find that such a brawl would not be hypothetical for long.

Worse, since the Nazis would likely have the support of Poland’s other neighbor, the Soviet Union, it was a fight from which Poland almost certainly would not emerge victorious. That did not mean the Poles were about to back down. On the contrary, the nation recognized the importance of a valiant defense, one that would set the tone for the years of partisan resistance that would follow.

It was in these most difficult of circumstances that Witold Pilecki found himself taking up arms in defense of his country, and not for the first time. Thirty-eight years old as he stared down the barrel of Nazi Germany, Pilecki had cut his teeth two decades earlier as a partisan fighter behind Soviet lines after the end of the First World War. He later fought for Poland’s Volunteer Army during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919 to 1921, served in the Battle of Warsaw, and was present at several of that war’s other inflection points, eventually transitioning to a role as an officer after the war’s end.

A poet and painter in his spare time, Pilecki spent the interwar years farming and tending to his family estate while supporting the Polish military as a reservist, and possibly as a member of Poland’s military intelligence service. He had been mobilized as the commander of a cavalry platoon just a few days before the German invasion, and at least outwardly, he was more than happy to take up arms for his nation no matter the cost.

When the war kicked off, Pilecki used his cavalry unit to support the Polish infantry. But after the division he was attached to was defeated in the first few days of battle, he broke off and worked in support of a range of other units for as long as he could. From this vantage point he witnessed the fall of Warsaw, the rise of the Polish government-in-exile in Paris, and the invasion of his nation by the Soviets as well as the Nazis. Eventually the Polish military was forced to capitulate and Pilecki’s unit was disbanded.

That did not mean the end of his fight. Instead, he moved underground alongside many of Poland’s surviving troops and became one of the founding members of the Secret Polish Army. Far more than a foot soldier, Pilecki immediately assumed a leadership role, overseeing the organization’s expansion into several of Poland’s major cities. Leading a double life as the manager of a cosmetics warehouse, he served in senior roles across the Secret Polish Army and worked hard to ensure the group did not take on too overtly a Christian, anti-Semitic, or nationalist tone, so as not to alienate what allies it had.

Before long, Pilecki found a group that fit more closely with his own vision of what a successful resistance had to be: the Union of Armed Struggle. This resistance organization counted equal rights for Jews, a mission to document Nazi atrocities, and a responsibility to get information to the Allied Powers among its critical objectives. After some work to convince his colleagues in the Secret Polish Army, Pilecki was able to merge the two organizations.

As he did, the resistance became aware of a new threat to investigate: a facility of some kind that had cropped up near the town of Oświęcim. The resistance knew its name, Auschwitz, and knew it was a place from which people did not return, but they did not know its purpose. They figured it was some sort of prison or POW camp, and they needed somebody to infiltrate it.

According to Pilecki’s own later statements, he had been chosen for the job as a kind of punishment for refusing to support a Secret Polish Army leader’s attempts to push the group toward ultranationalism. He agreed to take the job anyway. His mission: get arrested by the Nazis, try not to get killed, get taken to Auschwitz, figure out exactly what was going on inside, and then find a way out.

Inside Auschwitz

Pilecki and his allies did not know it at the time, but the camp they were sending him into was far worse than any ordinary wartime prison. When he began laying the groundwork for his capture, a year after the invasion of Poland in September 1940, Auschwitz was still being used primarily to detain Polish political prisoners and suspected members of the underground resistance. The first set of prisoners had only been there a couple of months by the time the infiltration began, and the camp was still finding what would become its terrible rhythm. Yet it already housed thousands of souls.

Although the facility already had operational crematoriums, they were not yet intended for use in mass murder, but for the disposal of bodies of prisoners who had died by other means. The Auschwitz that Pilecki was walking into was already a despicable place, but it had not yet evolved into the death camp it would become. That transformation was one Pilecki would watch from a front-row seat.

The moment came on the 19th of September, 1940, when Pilecki ensured he was present at a street intersection in Warsaw for what would be the second in a long series of street round-ups of Poles carried out by the Nazi SS. He was captured using the name and identification papers of Tomasz Serafiński, a Pole who was, by that time, assumed to already be dead. He was not, but Pilecki did not know that yet. After his capture, he was transported to Auschwitz with about 1,700 other prisoners.

In his reports after the fact, Pilecki described being annoyed by his fellow Poles, who seemed to go almost passively into the maw of whatever the Nazis had waiting. About the moment he arrived at the camp, Pilecki wrote in his final report: “I consider this place in my story to be the moment when I bade farewell to everything I had hitherto known on this earth and entered something seemingly no longer of it.”

Like any prisoner arriving at Auschwitz, Pilecki was immediately set upon by spotlights and SS soldiers swinging the butts of their rifles. He and the other arrivals were forced to watch one man be told to run to a post a few meters away, then be chased with automatic weapons fire and quickly mown down. As punishment for that man’s actions, which he had been instructed to perform by the SS, ten other men were selected at random and shot. The corpses were mutilated by dogs and dragged behind the prisoners, for all to see.

After that first demonstration, Pilecki was given prison clothing, photographed, and assigned prisoner number 4859. As he told it, the two thirteens hidden in his number, formed by adding together the outer numbers and adding the inner numbers, were taken as a bad omen by his fellow prisoners, although he himself found a wry bit of amusement in it. The new arrivals were given a brief explanation of why they had been brought to Auschwitz. According to the guards, they were a gang of Polish bandits who had been attacking peaceful Germans.

They also received a grim warning from the camp’s then-deputy commandant, Fritz Seidler: “Let none of you imagine that he will ever leave this place alive. It has been worked out that you will survive for six weeks; anyone who lives longer must be stealing, and anyone who is stealing will be sent to the penal colony, where you won’t live very long.”

After the chilling ordeal of his arrival, after he was shaved head to toe and had his front teeth knocked out, and after he met the fellow prisoner who would brutally keep order on his own cell block, a German known as Bloody Aloiz, Pilecki got to work. His first few days were spent figuring out essential rules for survival: avoid excess liquid consumption to avoid developing edema; keep clean feet to avoid beatings in the evening hours; stay at the center of every pack rather than fighting for the limited food and water; and never, ever miss roll call.

Then he turned his mind to resistance, happy to find that those same docile Poles who had seemed to accept their fate were now starting to get angry. In his words: “I felt that finally we were all united by the same anger, a desire for revenge. I felt myself in an environment perfectly suited to begin my work here and discovered within me a semblance of happiness, above all because I wanted to start work and so I had not cracked.”

Pilecki’s main objective was to set up an organization within the camp, uniting prisoners into a system where they could receive news from the outside world, distribute extra food and clothing to those who needed it, and get information out whenever possible. Underlying all of that was another mission: to lay the groundwork for the moment help eventually arrived, so the prisoners could be ready to take over the camp and assist an Allied assault.

His plan was to arrange prisoners into small cells of five men, each of which knew nothing of the others and had the task of building a network as if each cell sat at the head of an internal resistance operation. That way, if one cell were sniffed out and annihilated, its members would have no ability to give up the others inside the camp.

Pilecki risked an incredibly painful death if he trusted the wrong inmates with that responsibility and was sold out to the guards. But luckily for him, he had other resources within the camp, specifically other members of the Polish resistance who had been rounded up and were known to be trustworthy. From a group of twenty-five resistance fighters, Pilecki built five cells, which each developed on their own for a while before eventually running into one another.

When that happened, the person bringing him the news would generally get the equivalent of a pat on the head and a “don’t worry about it.” Keeping that wry, impossibly optimistic air about himself was integral; how could he ever hope to inspire the prisoners in his network if he himself faded into despair?

A Cursed Spy

All the while, Pilecki was watching the goings-on of the camp, not just as an academic observer, but as someone who was as much a prisoner at Auschwitz as anybody else. Forced to work crushing manual labor amid death, torture, and disease, he was more able than most to navigate the ins and outs of the camp, partly owing to his military training and experience, and partly to his physical hardiness relative to others interned there.

More than once in his writings, Pilecki discussed the people who had been doctors, lawyers, or held other roles in society that had demanded no exertion of the body or survivalist instinct of the mind. Invariably, he documented the extraordinary pain they experienced at Auschwitz, even relative to other prisoners. He also emphasized the sheer number of deaths on a daily basis, often the deaths of people he had come to know and respect, only to haul their bodies back to roll call at the day’s end.

Pilecki’s first big break came in December of his first year, when he charmed his way into an indoor job as a carpenter. Not only did this get him out of the camp’s most dangerous forms of forced labor, it gave him the opportunity to recover the strength he would need to run a resistance network, increased his chances of survival, and gave him a place to think in peace. Because the role demanded he complete numerous jobs around the camp, Pilecki found his way into restricted zones like the hospital and became a fly on the wall for conversations his camp superiors did not care if he overheard. Thanks to the extra food he could collect in his position, and his renewed strength compared to the ordinary Auschwitz prisoner, he survived a bout of pneumonia and continued forward.

All the while, he was writing: taking notes, compiling reports, and smuggling them as best he could until he could figure out how to get one out. Occasionally, as in the case of an ally named Tadek Burski, somebody he trusted would be released after family or friends found a way to get them out. When they left, it was with immensely valuable intelligence on their person.

Another prisoner in Pilecki’s network had been chosen to work in a nearby town and established lines of communication with locals, who sent letters that eventually reached the Polish Underground’s high command. A third was released with the help of a college friend who had become a German military officer, and when that inmate, one of Pilecki’s most trusted associates, got out, he carried a substantial report back to Warsaw.

Running so many parallel networks demanded constant work, not least to replenish the cells quickly to compensate for the high daily death tolls. Members of Pilecki’s cells generally had a better chance of survival than most, not just because they had some measure of purpose to keep them from complete despair, but because, in addition to their intelligence work, the cells organized the capture and distribution of stolen and scavenged food. As the cells grew, the prisoners among their number slowly took over certain work detachments, giving themselves some degree of safe haven even when assigned to the most brutal forms of work.

Often, Pilecki found himself in the position of mediator, trying to force collaboration between Poles who had been political enemies in the outside world. In his own words: “One had to show Poles daily a mountain of Polish corpses in order for them to reconcile.”

Then there were Pilecki’s efforts to worm his way upward through the camp structure, including among the guards. At Auschwitz, the torture of inmates was not optional for the guards; they were expected to regularly and proactively participate in the beatings and manual punishment of prisoners, and those who chose not to use those particular methods had better find some other way to express their sadism. Failing to do so, or refusing to take part in the torture at all, was tantamount to treason against the Nazi state.

The guards, being prisoners of the system themselves, were thus exposed to the entire world of pain from which they had been spared. But Pilecki could see that some guards engaged in it unwillingly, or looked for ways out of the violence when possible.

Several such guards eventually fell under Pilecki’s sway, although by and large none of them had any idea a broader underground movement existed. Instead, they would be approached by specific members of a cell who requested help for a friend or some support with a personal matter, and generally they would be willing to help out. Sometimes that meant assigning certain inmates to a certain work group; other times it was to ensure prisoners struggling to survive their outdoor work were moved indoors. Other guards found ways to get second portions to particularly exhausted prisoners, while still others tried to make the camp hospital a little less fatal for those sent there.

One guard in particular made sure not to stand in the way of prisoners who made contact with the outside world, and before long that guard was even helping to facilitate contact with other members of the Polish resistance, though it is unclear whether he understood the full scope of what he was doing. What was perfectly clear is that he withstood a brutal beating from the camp overseers after “failing to notice” that locals were providing extra bread to the inmates, and even after that punishment, the guard showed no intent to stop helping his fellow prisoners.

During this time, Pilecki cheated death on numerous occasions: by sweet-talking enraged camp guards in just the right way to avoid being shot over a minor slight; by battling through pneumonia; and by happening to be summoned to an SS administrative office on the same day several other inmates on his block were led away to be executed. When a person recognized him from Warsaw and addressed him by his real name rather than the false one he had come under, he was lucky enough to be surrounded exclusively by trusted allies. When it happened a second time, an inmate completely unknown to him had overheard, but that inmate would eventually join the ranks of the underground cells.

Perhaps most critical of all, Pilecki was repeatedly passed over when a camp supervisor selected the craftsmen who would build the neighboring Birkenau concentration camp, a decision akin to receiving a death sentence. He caught other lucky breaks more than once: mass transfers of new Polish civilians into the camp, while obviously devastating for those civilians, would invariably deposit a few more members of the Polish resistance into his lap. He found his way into the horse stables, where inmates had figured out how to make something resembling a cake, and could drink horse milk to sustain themselves.

It is worth taking a moment to emphasize just how fragile this entire structure was. Leaders of cells were recruited almost exclusively on Pilecki’s personal judgment of their character, with no wiggle room to trust the suggestions of cell members he did not know well. Trust was everything; if it were misplaced even once, Pilecki and an entire cell might have been found out, and if the wrong few people had broken under interrogation, the whole thing could have come collapsing down. Somehow, by the same inescapable luck that seemed to surround him, he chose correctly every time, and was never once sold out by a single person under his networks of command.

The Camp Becomes a Death Machine

Things in the camp grew more strained in August of 1941, when, shortly after the outbreak of war against the Soviet Union, the first mass gassings of camp inmates began. At first these were used only on handfuls of Soviet POWs, but by November Pilecki was witnessing columns of hundreds of Soviet prisoners stripped naked and ushered into the crematorium. Within a couple more months, this treatment was no longer reserved for the Soviets, who had come in large numbers unexpectedly and whom the SS had wanted to deal with quickly.

The year 1942 was even worse. Not only did gas execution rates skyrocket, especially against Jews in the camp, but camp authorities began to post mailboxes where prisoners could provide tips and anonymous disclosures. Luckily, Pilecki and his network were able to crack these boxes open and remove any problematic tips, while not obstructing those that might get rid of their own enemies. The camp also weathered increased rates of disease, especially typhus brought in by Soviet prisoners.

Here too, Pilecki and some of his associates tried to take advantage of the outbreak, cultivating infected lice and releasing them onto the coats of SS officers whenever they could. The effort proved successful, with many SS men killed as a result.

As 1942 wore on, the SS began zeroing in on possible resistance members, and Pilecki began making his own preparations for the network to survive in the event of his death. As he did, the resistance reached higher numbers than ever, with well over a hundred operatives inside Auschwitz that Pilecki personally kept track of, and probably more he had never encountered. In February of that year, he had another breakthrough, finally accumulating the parts to cobble together a radio transmitter.

Once it was operational, the resistance used it to broadcast details about the numbers of new arrivals and camp deaths, and to explain the state of the camp and the inmates there. Although the SS could hear the reports on the radio, they proved unable to find the source of the transmissions. On other lines of communication, run through in-person contact with locals, the resistance received anti-typhus medication and sent out German cipher keys.

As conditions got tougher, Pilecki endured a bout of typhus himself, but took his weeks of recovery as an opportunity to focus on organizing his resistance for military action. By October 1942, the camp’s resistance was organized into four battalions, each with several platoons of men beneath them, and unified under a single military commander, one of Pilecki’s close allies. At all times, one battalion was kept “on duty,” ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice if a signal came to strike. All the SS guards’ keys had been stolen and copied, and even some of the guards themselves had made clear they would be on the inmates’ side in the event of a riot.

By this point, as Pilecki himself wrote: “For some months now we had been able to take over the camp on more or less a daily basis.” The prisoners at Auschwitz had been so worn down, for so long, that all the Nazis believed they needed to control them was a handful of small watchtowers and a squadron of SS enforcers. But without any support to hold the camp once it was captured, or to get everyone out of Nazi-controlled territory safely, there was little use in taking it over.

For the rest of 1942 and into 1943, things only got worse. Medical doctors and students descended on the camp, carrying out human experimentation, something Pilecki’s organization made sure to investigate, but were horrified to learn about once they understood what was taking place. More and more inmates were being shot, not at random, but because of accusations that they were beginning to organize, and in general, the SS began gaining aptitude as sniffer dogs trying to root out Pilecki’s spiderweb of allies.

Thousands of Poles were removed from the camp entirely and sent elsewhere in attempts to shake up whatever networks existed. On the brighter side, inmates were allowed for the first time to receive small parcels of food, which arrived in crushing amounts once families on the outside got word of the opportunity to help their loved ones. But even this was small consolation, in a place where incredible human depravity was still finding new ways to reveal its darkest nature.

Escape

For Pilecki, the question of escape was one he would eventually have to face. Smuggled letters could only convey so much, and could have been altered, but his testimony and detailed intelligence, presented in the flesh, could prove crucial to liberating the camp. Escape also came at high cost. Beginning in the spring of 1941, the Auschwitz guards instituted a policy that would see ten prisoners shot for every one who escaped, a harsh reality that changed Pilecki’s own outlook.

As he wrote when the policy came into effect: “At that time we, as an organization, took a clear position against escapes. We organized no escapes and opposed any thought of them, as evidence of extreme egoism, until there were major changes in this area. For the time being all escapes were lone ventures having nothing to do with our organization.”

That changed in February of 1942, when orders came down from Nazi high command after the policy of killing ten for every escapee had apparently prompted reprisals in Allied camps. And when, a year later, the SS threatened to bring escapees’ families to Auschwitz as punishment and displayed two doomed women as an example, they were found out for having selected random women from the nearby camp of Rajsko.

This meant escape was now on the table, and it was sorely needed, at a time when the wanton brutality of the camp’s early years had been replaced by something almost worse: a cold, clinical, processional effort to end lives at an astonishing rate. Adding to the risk, infiltrators had started to appear, collaborators sent into the camps to join, then expose, resistance networks on behalf of the SS. Early escapes consisted of small pockets of resistance associates carrying out Pilecki’s reports, including one group of four that managed to steal and don SS uniforms and escape in the camp commandant’s car. Others made mass escape attempts when they were selected for particularly harsh forms of internment, with a small handful successfully getting out, in exchange for the lives of dozens of their comrades.

In Pilecki’s case, his first idea came via the sewers. His friends in Auschwitz’s construction office had been able to procure a map of the camp’s sewer network, from which he charted the best entry and exit points. But this plan proved too risky, and he set to work finding another route. As he did, he encountered a prisoner called Jasiek, whom he chose as an ally, and together they formed a plan to escape through the Auschwitz bakery while working a night shift.

After they got Jasiek assigned to the bakery, he was so successful and well-liked by the floor boss that he was made a deputy supervisor and given the run of the night shifts. Then Pilecki himself feigned typhus, getting assigned to the quarantine block, where he was helped by a couple of members of the resistance. He extended one of them, a twenty-year-old named Edek who had come to Auschwitz barely a man, an opportunity to join the escape, and Edek quickly accepted.

The young Pole threw what amounted to a temper tantrum against his current boss, only to graciously accept a transfer to the bakery. He brought a transfer card for Pilecki, too.

When the time for their night shift came, they were just barely able to time their escape to avoid the bakery guards, who spotted their departure but were unable to find a clean shot with their sidearms. After days spent fleeing through the countryside, dodging civilians, relying on the help of a few seemingly trustworthy strangers, and getting shot in the shoulder while running from a German soldier they had stumbled upon, Pilecki and his associates made it to the home of one of their Auschwitz allies’ own parents.

In one last, incredibly strange twist of fate, when it came time for that elderly couple to put Pilecki in touch with the local commander from the Polish underground, the person he encountered was one Tomasz Serafiński. That was the exact name and identity Pilecki himself had been using during his years in Auschwitz, after Serafiński’s papers had been provided to him under the false assumption that the man was dead. Pilecki chronicled the exceptional conversation in his writings:

“I introduced myself with the name I had used in Auschwitz. He replied: ‘I’m also Tomasz.’ I said, ‘but I’m Tomasz.’ ‘I’m also Tomasz,’ he said in surprise.

Leon listened to this exchange in astonishment, as did the man’s wife. ‘But I was born here.’ I now proceeded to name the day, year, and month, which I had repeated so many times in Auschwitz at every change of block or commando, and for the notes drawn up by the kapos. The man almost leapt from his chair.

‘What’s going on here? Those are my personal details.’ ‘Yes, they are, but they have gone through far more with me than with you.’”

Pilecki ended up staying for months with the real Tomasz, forming a resistance unit with the goal of attacking and liberating Auschwitz, while writing to several of his contacts to update them on his status and that of the camp. He was lucky enough to miss a visit from the SS, who spoke to the real Tomasz and immediately dismissed him as someone who had had his identity stolen. Eventually he made his way to Warsaw, presenting his plans for a liberating operation.

In the course of his work, Pilecki wrote his final report on Auschwitz, a document that survives and is available for public consumption. It chronicles his experiences in the camp in detail, not just what he saw, but how he had made the people there ready to resist. The first page, in an incredibly understated admission of the gravity of what he had witnessed, reads in part: “I am to write down the driest of facts, which is what my friends want me to do.

They have told me: ‘The more you stick to the bare facts without any kind of commentary, the more valuable it all will be.’ Well, here I go, but we were not made out of wood, let alone stone, though sometimes it seemed as if even a stone would have broken out in a sweat. One was not made out of stone, though I often envied it; one still had a heart beating, sometimes in one’s mouth.”

Back Into the Fray

After he found his way back to the resistance, Pilecki joined a sabotage unit while coordinating the resistance inside the camp as best he could from afar. In that double role, he participated in the Warsaw Uprising, first as a common soldier under a false identity, and then, when too many officers were killed for the operation to sustain itself, he came forward to take command of a battalion himself. In the lead-up to the uprising, he had also become a member of an anti-communist secret organization, fully expecting that when the Nazis finally fell, he and his resistance would have to pivot and oppose the Soviet Union rather than taking much more than a day off. His role there was to put together a structure of people to plan combat operations, in the event that they were indeed forced back underground.

But the Warsaw Uprising was no kinder to Pilecki than to any other Pole. Despite good success with his own unit, he was powerless to stop the collapse of the broader insurgency, and in October 1944 he was taken captive and sent to a POW camp called Murnau. There he lay far lower than he had at Auschwitz, mostly taking care of young freedom fighters who had never been in such a situation before. When he was let out, it was because the camp had been liberated, not because of any daring escape on his part.

By then Auschwitz had been liberated too, and not by a Polish operation.

It is here that we have to acknowledge that despite the incredible value of Pilecki’s acts inside Auschwitz, despite the countless lives he undoubtedly saved by orchestrating the delivery of food, resources, and hope, and despite the contents of his report, his ultimate goal inside the camp was never realized. The cavalry, the Polish winged hussars of legend, never came to liberate Auschwitz, a task that instead fell to the Soviet Union. How Pilecki himself felt about that is difficult to say, although it seems a fair bet that the good he did in the meantime was more than enough to make his ordeal worth it.

After the war’s conclusion, Pilecki was briefly dispatched to Italy to convalesce, where he wrote out his memories and worked with Polish military commanders about what would come next. By December of 1945 he was back in Poland, this time under another false name. But this version of Poland, while thankfully unlike the one that had been occupied by Nazi Germany, was nonetheless unrecognizable from the nation where Pilecki had spent his early adulthood. With Soviet secret police and their local militias taking over, the anti-communist organization Pilecki had joined had been dissolved, but its former leaders were hard at work, spawning guerrilla units and widely scattered cells that were trying hard, though not always successfully, to stay a step ahead of the Soviets.

In this environment, Pilecki built a new network from the ground up, calling on his surviving contacts and cobbling together an intimate knowledge of the new Soviet regime. At the same time, he devoted significant personal resources to compiling memories and accounts of the Auschwitz resistance, frustrated by fabricated stories that Soviet propagandists were spreading about the camp. But before long, he received word that his identity had been uncovered by the Soviets. Faced with the decision to leave Poland and his family, as well as leaving his resistance network with no suitable replacement at its head, Pilecki resolved to stay for as long as he could.

A Bullet to the Back of the Head

As long as he could turned out to be the eighth of May, 1947, when Pilecki was taken into custody by communist authorities. Kept in complete isolation from his fellow prisoners, he was interrogated by a pack of Soviet-backed secret police known for their brutality, who tortured him for a long six months and elicited a number of forced confessions and endorsements of statements the Soviets had prepared. Even in this most impossible of circumstances, Pilecki still managed to avoid revealing any genuinely sensitive information.

In March of 1948, Pilecki was convicted of espionage, conspiracy to assassinate Polish officials, and a number of other charges in what amounted to a show trial. Two months later he was sentenced to death, despite pleas to the communist regime from many Auschwitz survivors. On May 25, 1948, an agent named Piotr Śmietański did the one thing the Auschwitz concentration camp never could: he executed Witold Pilecki with a gunshot to the back of the head. The location of his burial remains unknown, although he is memorialized today in several locations across Poland.

In one last blow to his work, Pilecki’s writings and accounts of what happened in Auschwitz were suppressed for decades after his death, in order to prevent his example from being used to inspire further resistance. It was not until the 1990s, after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, that his efforts were finally revealed to the world. In the years since, he has been posthumously honored with Poland’s highest decoration, the Order of the White Eagle, and commemorated all across his country in monuments and media. To this day, he is believed to have been the only person ever to voluntarily enter Auschwitz as an inmate, and it is impossible to truly quantify the continued results of his work in the descendants of people who would not have survived without him.

What can be quantified is the simple fact that Witold Pilecki was one of one. When faced with one of the darkest and most apocalyptic places humanity has ever created, he, and he alone, chose to look it in the eye and force it to back down first. He was a man who did the unthinkable, whether for love of country, love of freedom, or, perhaps most likely of all, love of humanity. He may not have been the spy who liberated Auschwitz, but he was the spy who brought word of it to the whole world, from inside a place no other person would ever have dared to go.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did Witold Pilecki volunteer to be sent to Auschwitz?

The Polish resistance had become aware of a mysterious facility near the town of Oświęcim, known as Auschwitz, a place from which people did not return. They believed it was some kind of prison or POW camp and needed someone to infiltrate it to learn its purpose. Pilecki was chosen for the mission, by his own later account partly as a punishment for refusing to support a Secret Polish Army leader’s push toward ultranationalism, and he agreed to take it on. His orders were to get arrested, get taken to the camp, find out what was happening inside, and find a way out.

How did Pilecki organize resistance inside the camp?

He built an underground network arranged into small cells of five men each. Crucially, each cell knew nothing of the others, so that if one cell were discovered and destroyed, its members could not betray the rest under interrogation. The cells received news from outside, distributed extra food and clothing, smuggled out intelligence reports, and laid groundwork to seize the camp if Allied help ever came. At its height, the network numbered well over a hundred operatives that Pilecki personally tracked, eventually organized into four battalions with one kept on permanent standby.

What were some of the network’s most audacious operations?

Pilecki’s network cracked open the SS tip mailboxes to remove disclosures that threatened them while letting through those that hurt their enemies. During a typhus outbreak, they cultivated infected lice and released them onto the coats of SS officers, killing many. They cobbled together a working radio transmitter to broadcast arrival and death figures that the SS could hear but never trace. They also stole and copied the guards’ keys and smuggled out German cipher keys to the Polish underground.

How did Pilecki escape Auschwitz?

After abandoning an early plan to flee through the camp’s sewers, he engineered an escape through the Auschwitz bakery. An ally named Jasiek got himself installed as a deputy supervisor on the bakery night shift, and Pilecki feigned typhus to reach the quarantine block, recruiting a young prisoner named Edek along the way. Transferred to the bakery, the three timed their break to slip past the guards, who spotted them but could not get a clean shot. After days on the run, including a gunshot wound to Pilecki’s shoulder, they reached safety.

What happened to Pilecki after the war?

He returned to a Poland under Soviet control, where he built a new intelligence network and worked to document the truth of the Auschwitz resistance against Soviet propaganda. Arrested by communist authorities on May 8, 1947, he was tortured for six months, convicted of espionage and other charges in a show trial in March 1948, and executed on May 25, 1948, with a gunshot to the back of the head. His writings were suppressed for decades and only revealed to the world after the fall of communism in the 1990s, after which he was posthumously awarded the Order of the White Eagle.

Sources

1. The Auschwitz Volunteer by Witold Pilecki (contributors: Norman Davies, Michael Schudrich, Jarek Garliński)
2. England’s Poles in the Game: WWII Intelligence Cooperation, Institute of World Politics
3. The Remarkable Story of the Man Who Volunteered to Enter Auschwitz, TIME
4. Military Review, Army University Press
5. Zagłada Żydów (journal article)
6. Rotmistrz Witold Pilecki, Institute of National Remembrance (IPN)
7. Witold Pilecki, Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
8. Witold Pilecki, Jewish Virtual Library
9. NPR coverage of Witold Pilecki
10. The Auschwitz volunteer the Nazis couldn’t break, The Washington Post