Witold Pilecki (; 13 May 190125 May 1948), known by the codenames Roman Jezierski, Tomasz Serafiński, Druh and Witold, was a Polish World War II cavalry officer, intelligence agent, and resistance leader.
As a youth, Pilecki joined Polish underground scouting; in the aftermath of World War I, he joined the Polish militia and, later, the Polish Army. He participated in the Polish–Soviet War, which ended in 1921. In 1939, he participated in the unsuccessful defence of Poland against the invasion by Nazi Germany, the Slovak Republic, and the Soviet Union. Shortly afterward, he joined the Polish resistance, co-founding the Secret Polish Army resistance movement. In 1940, Pilecki let himself be captured by the occupying Germans in order to be voluntarily sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp and infiltrate it. At Auschwitz, he organized a resistance movement that eventually included hundreds of inmates, and he secretly drew up reports detailing German atrocities at the camp, which were smuggled out to Home Army headquarters and shared with the Western Allies. After escaping from Auschwitz in April 1943, Pilecki fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August–October 1944. Following its suppression, he was interned in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
After the communist takeover of Poland, Pilecki remained loyal to the London-based Polish government-in-exile. He returned to Poland in 1945 to report back on the situation there to the government-in-exile. Before travelling home, and anticipating that he might be killed by Poland's new communist authorities, Pilecki completed the compilation known as Witold's Report which recorded his Auschwitz experiences in detail. Pilecki's fears were well founded: in 1947, he was arrested by the secret police on charges of working for "foreign imperialism" and the following year, after being subjected to torture and a show trial, he was executed in Warsaw aged 47.
Pilecki's story, inconvenient to the Polish communist authorities, remained mostly unknown for several decades. One of the first accounts of Pilecki's mission to Auschwitz was given by Polish historian Józef Garliński—himself a former Auschwitz inmate who emigrated to Britain after the war—in Fighting Auschwitz: The Resistance Movement in the Concentration Camp (1975). Several monographs appeared in subsequent years, particularly after the fall of communism in Poland allowed for research into his life by Polish historians.
Early life and education
Witold Pilecki was born on 13 May 1901 in the town of Olonets, Karelia, in the Russian Empire. He was a descendant of a Polish-speaking noble family (szlachta) of the Leliwa coat of arms. His ancestors had been deported to Russia from their home in Lithuania (former Nowogródek Voivodeship region, now in Belarus) for participating in the January 1863–64 Uprising, for which a major part of their estate was confiscated. Witold was one of five children of forest inspector Julian Pilecki and Ludwika Osiecimska.
In 1910, Witold moved with his mother and siblings to Vilnius, to attend a Polish school there, while his father remained in Olonets. In Vilnius, Pilecki attended a local school and joined the underground Polish Scouting and Guiding Association (Związek Harcerstwa Polskiego, ZHP).
Following the outbreak of World War I, in 1916 Pilecki was sent by his mother to a school in the Russian city of Oryol, located safer in the East than Vilnius. There he attended a gymnasium (secondary school) and founded a local chapter of the ZHP.
Early military career
Polish–Soviet War In 1918, following the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I, Pilecki returned to Vilnius, then outside the control of the Polish government, and joined the ZHP section of the Self-Defence of Lithuania and Belarus, a paramilitary formation under Major General Władysław Wejtko. The militia disarmed the passing German troops and took up positions to defend the city from a looming attack by the Soviet Red Army. After Vilnius fell to Bolshevik forces on 5 January 1919, Pilecki and his unit resorted to partisan warfare behind Soviet lines. He and his comrades then retreated to Białystok, where Pilecki enlisted as a szeregowy (private) in Poland's newly established Army. He fought in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1920, serving under Captain Jerzy Dąbrowski and being involved in the Vilna offensive. He fought in the Kiev offensive (1920) and as part of a cavalry unit defending the then-Polish city of Grodno. On 5 August 1920, Pilecki joined the and fought in the crucial Battle of Warsaw and then in the Rūdninkai Forest. Pilecki later was involved in the Polish–Lithuanian War as a member of the October 1920 Żeligowski's Mutiny where Polish troops occupied Vilnius in a false-flag operation.
Interwar years By the conclusion of the Polish-Soviet War in March 1921, Pilecki was promoted to the rank of plutonowy (corporal), becoming a non-commissioned officer. Shortly afterward, Pilecki was transferred to the army reserves, completing courses required for a non-commissioned officer rank at the Cavalry Reserve Officers' Training School in Grudziądz. He went on to complete his secondary education (matura) later that same year. He briefly enrolled with the Faculty of Fine Arts at Stefan Batory University but was forced to abandon his studies in 1924 due to both financial issues and the declining health of his father. In July 1925, Pilecki was assigned to the 26th Lancer Regiment with the rank of Chorąży (ensign). Pilecki would be promoted to podporucznik (second lieutenant, with seniority from 1923) the following year. Also in September 1926, Pilecki became the owner of his family's ancestral estate, Sukurcze, in the Lida District of the Nowogródek Voivodeship. In 1931, he married (1906–2002). They had two children, born in Vilnius over the next two years: Andrzej and . Pilecki actively supported the local farming community. He was also an amateur poet and painter. He organized the Krakus Military Horsemen Training program in 1932 and was appointed to command the 1st Lida Military Training Squadron, which in 1937 was placed under the Polish 19th Infantry Division. In 1938, Pilecki received the Silver Cross of Merit for his activities.
World War II
Polish September Campaign With Polish–German tensions growing in mid-1939, Pilecki was mobilized as a cavalry platoon commander on 26 August 1939. He was assigned to the 19th Infantry Division under Major General Józef Kwaciszewski, part of the Army Prusy and his unit took part in heavy fighting against the advancing Germans during the invasion of Poland. The 19th Division was almost completely destroyed following a clash with the German forces on the night of 5/6 September at the Battle of Piotrków Trybunalski. Its remains were incorporated into the 41st Infantry Division, which was withdrawn to the southeast toward Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) and the Romanian bridgehead. In the 41st Division, Pilecki served as divisional second-in-command of its cavalry detachment, under Major Jan Włodarkiewicz. He and his men destroyed seven German tanks, shot down one aircraft, and destroyed two more on the ground. On 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland, which worsened the already desperate situation of the Polish forces. On 22 September, the 41st Division suffered a major defeat and capitulated. Włodarkiewicz and Pilecki were among the many soldiers who did not follow the order of Commander-in-Chief General Edward Śmigły-Rydz to retreat through Romania to France, instead opting to stay underground in Poland.
Resistance On 9 November 1939 in Warsaw, Major Włodarkiewicz, Second Lieutenant Pilecki, Second Lieutenant Jerzy Maringe, Jerzy Skoczyński, and brothers Jan and Stanisław Dangel founded the Secret Polish Army (, TAP), one of the first underground organizations in Poland. Włodarkiewicz became its leader, while Pilecki became TAP's organizational head as it expanded to cover Warsaw, Siedlce, Radom, Lublin, and other major cities in central Poland. As cover, Pilecki worked as manager of a cosmetics storehouse. From 25 November 1939 until May 1940, he was TAP's inspector and chief of staff. From August 1940, he headed its 1st branch (organization and mobilization).
TAP was based on Christian ideological values. While Pilecki wanted to avert a religious mission so as not to alienate potential allies, Włodarkiewicz blamed Poland's defeat on its failure to create a Catholic nation and wanted to remake the country by appealing to right-wing groups. In the spring of 1940, Pilecki saw that Włodarkiewicz's views had become more antisemitic and that he had put ultranationalist dogma into their newsletter, ; Włodarkiewicz had also entered into talks about a merger with the far-right underground, including a group that had offered Nazi Germany a Polish puppet government. To stop him, Pilecki went to Colonel Stefan Rowecki, chief of a rival resistance group, the Union of Armed Struggle (Związek Walki Zbrojnej, ZWZ), which called for equal rights for Jews, gathered intelligence on German atrocities, and delivered it by courier to the Western Allies in an attempt to gain their involvement. The ZWZ had alerted the Polish Government-in-Exile that the Germans were inciting Polish hatred against the Jews, and that this might lead to the rise of a Polish Quisling.
Pilecki called for TAP to submit to Rowecki's authority, but Włodarkiewicz refused and issued a manifesto that the future Poland had to be Christian, based on national identity, and that those who opposed the idea should be "removed from our lands". Pilecki refused to swear the proposed oath. In August, Włodarkiewicz announced at a TAP meeting that they would, after all, join the mainstream underground with Rowecki – and that it had been proposed that Pilecki should infiltrate the Auschwitz concentration camp. Little was known about how the Germans ran the then-new camp, which was thought to be an internment camp or large prison rather than a death camp. Włodarkiewicz said it was not an order but an invitation to volunteer, though Pilecki saw it as a punishment for refusing to back Włodarkiewicz's ideology. Nevertheless, he agreed, which years later led to him being described in many sources as having volunteered to infiltrate Auschwitz.
Auschwitz Pilecki was one of 2,000 men arrested on 19 September 1940. He used the identity documents of Tomasz Serafiński, who had been mistakenly assumed to be dead. Two backstories exist purporting to explain how Pilecki actually found himself in Auschwitz. In one version, he allowed himself to be captured by the occupying Germans in one of their Warsaw street round-ups, in order to infiltrate the camp. In the second version, he did that in the apartment of Eleonora Ostrowska, at ulica Wojska Polskiego (Polish Army Street) during a building search. Afterward, along with 1,705 other prisoners, between 21 and 22 September 1940, Pilecki reached Auschwitz where, under Serafiński's name, he was assigned prisoner number 4859. In autumn of 1941 he learnt that he had been promoted to porucznik (first lieutenant) by people "far away in the outside world in Warsaw".
While in various slave labour kommandos and surviving pneumonia at Auschwitz, Pilecki organized an underground Military Organization Union (Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, ZOW). Its tasks were to improve the morale of the inmates, provide news from outside the camp, distribute extra food and clothing to its members, set up intelligence networks, and train detachments to take over the camp in the event of a relief attack. ZOW was organized as secret cells, each of five members. Over time, many smaller underground organizations at Auschwitz eventually merged with ZOW.