INFILTRATING AUSCHWITZ
“ONE PRISONER WAS ASKED BY THE SS TO RUN TO A POST BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, ONLY TO BE SHOT DOWN. TEN MEN WERE THEN DRAGGED OUT AND SHOT AT RANDOM AS ‘COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY’ FOR THE ‘ESCAPE’”
As a man of exceptional courage, Captain Witold Pilecki stands near-peerless in the pantheon of wartime heroes, and his mission in Auschwitz was just one of many extraordinarily brave acts of his life.
He was born on 13 May 1901 in Olonets, northern Russia. His family had suffered the same fate as countless other Polish families – his grandfather had been deported to Siberia, following the failed uprising of 1863. During the time of Partitions when Poland, carved up between Russia, Prussia and Austria, could not to be found on any map, the Pilecki family remained faithful Polish patriots. In 1910, to avoid the Russification of his children, Witold’s father sent him and his siblings to school in Vilnius, one of the capitals of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. There, Witold joined the scout movement and later became part of the Polish underground military organisation.
At the outbreak of WWI, the Pilecki family was not in Vilnius, but before the war’s end Witold joined the Vilnius Self-Defence militia, which first fought the Germans holding the city in 1918 and later Red Army units.
