Witold Pilecki (1901 – 1948)

[pieter]

[pieter]

Witold Pilecki



Witold Pilecki (13 May 1901 – 25 May 1948; codenames Roman Jezierski, Tomasz Serafiński, Druh, Witold) was a Polish cavalry officer, intelligence agent, and resistance leader. He served as a cavalry officer in the Polish Army in the Polish–Soviet War (14 February 1919 – 18 October 1920) and World War II. Pilecki was also a co-founder of the Secret Polish Army resistance group and later a member of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa). He was the author of Witold's Report, the first comprehensive intelligence report on the atrocities committed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Pilecki was a Roman Catholic and a Polish patriot who viewed his struggle as a moral and patriotic duty.

During World War II, Pilecki volunteered for a Polish resistance operation that involved being imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp in order to gather intelligence. At Auschwitz, he organized a resistance movement within the camp which eventually numbered in the hundreds, and secretly sent messages to the Western Allies detailing Nazi atrocities at the camp. He escaped in April 1943 after nearly 2½ years of imprisonment. Pilecki later fought in the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944. He remained loyal to the London-based Polish government-in-exile after the communist takeover of Poland. In 1947, he was arrested by the Polish Stalinist (communist) secret police Urząd Bezpieczeństwa on charges of working for "foreign imperialism" (referring to his work for British intelligence). Pilecki was executed after a Stalinist show trial in 1948. The story of Pilecki's mission in Auschwitz was told in Fighting Auschwitz (1975) by emigre Polish historian Józef Garliński, himself a former Auschwitz inmate. Information about his exploits and fate was suppressed by Poland's communist regime until democracy returned to Poland in 1989. Pilecki's story did not become widely known until after the 1990s.

Pilecki is now considered "one of the greatest wartime heroes". Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich writes in The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery: "When God created the human being, God had in mind that we should all be like Captain Witold Pilecki, of blessed memory." British historian Norman Davies writes: "If there was an Allied hero who deserved to be remembered and celebrated, this was a person with few peers." Ryszard Schnepf, Polish ambassador to the United States, described Pilecki as a "diamond among Poland's heroes" and "the highest example of Polish patriotism" in 2013.



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki
www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/witold-pilecki

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

What was behind Witold Pilecki's (1901 – 1948) experience in the German/Austrian Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz on Polish soil in the Southern Polish town Oświęcim (German: Auschwitz) in the Lesser Poland (Polish: Małopolska) province of southern Poland, situated 50 kilometres (31 mi) west of Kraków? The political, technical, financial, economical and ideological and colonialist (Nazi) organisation, the mechanism, the system, political structures and the military and police organisations behind the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish Question. The SS-Totenkopfverbände ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-Totenkopfverb%C3%A4nde ) and the Reich Main Security Office (German: Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA). The organization's stated duty was to fight all "enemies of the Reich" inside and outside the borders of Nazi Germany.







30 June mentioned in the beginning of Heinrich Himmler's speech refers to the Night of the Long Knives. The Night of the Long Knives (German: Nacht der langen Messer), or the Röhm Purge, also called Operation Hummingbird (German: Unternehmen Kolibri), was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from June 30 to July 2, 1934. Chancellor Adolf Hitler, urged on by Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, ordered a series of political extrajudicial executions intended to consolidate his power and alleviate the concerns of the German military about the role of Ernst Röhm and the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazis' paramilitary organization. Nazi propaganda presented the murders as a preventive measure against an alleged imminent coup by the SA under Röhm – the so-called Röhm Putsch. ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives )

[pieter]

Oświęcim 1939-1945


The Red triangle with the P in it stands for Polish prisoner of Auschwitz

There were approximately 8,000 Jews in Oświęcim (German: Auschwitz) on the eve of World War II, comprising more than half the population. About 4,000 citizens of Oświęcim were Roman Catholic Poles. The Nazis annexed the area to Germany in October 1939 in the Gau of Upper Silesia, which became part of the "second Ruhr" by 1944.

In 1940, Nazi Germany used forced labor to build a new subdivision to house Auschwitz guards and staff, and they decided to build a large chemical plant of IG Farben in 1941 in the eastern outskirts of the town. Polish residents of several districts were forced to abandon their houses, as the Germans wanted to keep the area empty around Auschwitz concentration camp. They planned a 40 square kilometres (15 sq mi) buffer zone around the camp, and they expelled Polish residents in two stages in 1940 and 1941. All the residents of the Zasole district were forced to abandon their homes. In the Plawy and Harmeze districts, more than 90-percent of the buildings were destroyed and the residents of Plawy were transported to Gorlice to fend for themselves. Altogether, some 17,000 people in Oświęcim itself and surrounding villages were forced to leave their homes, and eight villages were wiped off the map, and the population of Oświęcim which consisted of about 12,000 citizens before the war shrank to 7,600 by April 1941.


Expulsion from Reichsgau Wartheland. Poles are led to trains under German army escort, as part of the ethnic cleansing of western Poland annexed to the German Reich following the invasion. The Poles were often replaced by Baltic Germans, the Volksdeutsche or Germans coming from the West from Germany (in fact colonists). In 1942-1943, tens of thousands of inhabitants of the Zamość region were ethnically cleansed by the Nazi occupiers, to make space for German settlers in order to Germanize the area. Most of them were deported to forced Nazi labor camps in Germany, concentration or extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Majdanek and Bełżec.


Czesława Kwoka (15 August 1928 – 12 March 1943) was born in Wólka Złojecka, a small village in Poland, to a Catholic mother, Katarzyna Kwoka. Along with her mother (prisoner number 26946), Czesława Kwoka (prisoner number 26947) was deported and transported from Zamość, Poland, to Auschwitz, on 13 December 1942. On 12 March 1943, less than a month after her mother died (18 February 1943), Czesława Kwoka died at the age of 14; the circumstances of her death were not recorded.

The Red Army liberated the town and the camp on 27 January 1945, and they opened two temporary camps for German POWs in the complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Soviet camp existed until autumn 1945, and the Birkenau camp lasted until spring 1946. Some 15,000 Germans were interned there. Furthermore, there was a camp of Communist secret police (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa) near the rail station in the complex of former "Gemeinschaftslager". Its prisoners were members of the NSDAP (Nazi party), Hitlerjugend, and BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädel; English: League of German Girls), as well as German civilians, the Volksdeutsche, and Upper Silesians who were suspected of being disloyal to Poland.


Seweryna Szmaglewska (1916–1992) was a Polish writer, known for both books for children and adults alike. Her novels "Czarne Stopy" (Black Feet) and "Dymy nad Birkenau" (Smoke over Birkenau) are compulsory reading in Polish schools.

She was born on February 11, 1916 in Przygłów near Piotrków Trybunalski, then in Central Powers' occupied part of the Kingdom of Poland. She graduated from the Free Polish University and went on to study at the Polish language and literature faculties of the Jagiellonian University of Cracow and the Łódź University. Between 1942 and 1945 she was an inmate of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. As a Holocaust survivor, she was one of very few Poles to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.

After the war she went on to be a successful writer. Initially focusing on her war-time experiences ("Dymy nad Birkenau", "Łączy nas gniew", "Niewinni w Norymberdze"), with time she also started publishing novels for teenagers. Her best-known novel "Czarne Stopy" (published in 1960) was later turned into a successful 1986 film by Waldemar Podgórski. She died on July 7, 1992 in Warsaw.

[Jaga]

Pieter,

thanks for reminding this story.

Pilecki was really a brave man. His life is almost unreal, too bad that he was killed with one shot at the back of his head. He definitively deserves a movie.

[pieter]

kafkadesk.org/2021/09/19/on-this-day-in-1940-polish-resistance-hero-witold-pilecki-was-voluntarily-sent-to-auschwitz/?fbclid=IwAR00cTnI7G1TGlHQJmW_3IPX4vrwOwCrdHmOJbKalMu3LRfELn4qp4oUlpI