Witold Pilecki-

One Man, One Camp, One Stand for

Millions

Eric Newton, Nick Duncan,

Junior Division
Group Documentary
Word Count: 500 Words
 With a bravery no other could describe, Witold Pilecki took a stand in history when he

sacrificed his life to a sentence at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, where he formed a resistance

network, warned the Allies the Nazis were committing genocide, and proved Hitlers propaganda

false.

Pilecki impacted the world when he put forth his outstanding leadership skills to create a secret

army that fought against the Nazi tyranny, and sparked hope in many people. If Pilecki had not

risked his life, most of the world would never truly understand what the Nazis had done, and

what they planned to do.

We chose this topic because Witold Pilecki showed extreme bravery through his actions,

and many people in todays world would be terrified to do what he did. Another reason we chose

this topic is that Pilecki continued to fight until each and every person was rescued from tyranny.

We knew from the beginning that we had a great topic, since we learned about the importance of

Pileckis stand in history, and why it's important today.

During our research, we learned that Pilecki had also fought against Communist Russia

multiple times. This is important to know, since it proves that Pilecki had stood for something

greater, and more powerful than either Nazi Germany or Soviet Union. We found many primary

documents on the Institute of National Remembrance, a Polish government agency containing

several documents from World War II. The primary sources mainly consisted of letters Pilecki

had sent to people informing them on what needed to be done to fight the Nazis.
 We chose to do a documentary because of our previous experiences with exhibit boards

and we decided to try something new. Also, we have both been in groups many times where

weve used WeVideo to create movies for our projects. Because of this, we knew right away that

a documentary would be the greatest choice for our project.

A couple problems we ran into were citations and setting up interviews. Citations were a

bit difficult since we had to keep track of our annotations and what images we were going to

actually use. Also, we had several people in mind we wanted to do for an interview. We wanted

to interview Andrzej Pilecki because he is the son of Witold Pilecki, and he would be able to tell

us what Pilecki was like since he met him before he passed away. We also wanted to interview

Jarek Garlinski because he is the translator of The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery. This

book is our best primary source since it has Pileckis final report on Auschwitz Concentration

Camp.

Overall, we managed to examine several primary documents, and use our past

experiences of video and film to create and present a documentary. Special thanks goes to the

Polish Resistance Museum and Lawrence W. Reed for information, and special thanks to the

Polish Institute of National Remembrance and Jewish Virtual Library for images. Pilecki had

changed the world and we will prove it.