Witold Pilecki: the forgotten hero
As we just celebrated the seventy fifht anniversary of the liberation of the German death camp of Auschwitz, let us remember one of the greatest heroes amoung the prisoners, the Polish officer Witold Pilecki.
Witold Pilecki was a Polish Christian officer who decided to get deported to the German death camp of Auschwitz. He entered into Auschwitz to give hope to the prisoners and organize resistence to the German invader. He than warned the Allies about the massacres taking place there.
He wrote several reports explaining in details the scale of the massacres taking place there. He managed to escape the death camp and decided to share the information he gathered with the world.
In reports sent to London, he reported first about the murder of Soviet prisoners of war, where the effectiveness of gas chambers was tested, then about the Holocaust, i.e. the extermination of Jews.
Documents published in recent years show that British and American secret services were perfectly aware since beginning that there was a genocide going on in the occupied territories of Poland. However they didn’t react. Pilecki’s reports were held by both British Prime Minister Churchill and US President Roosevelt.
In 1947, Witold Pilecki got arrested by the Communist police who took power in Poland. He wa considered as a spy by the new totalitarian regime. He therefore got subjected to horrible tortures by the police.
“In comparison to what they [the Communists] did to me, Auschwitz was a kids game” confessed Pilecki to his wife. “I tried to live my life in a way that when I will be facing death, I will feel joy rather than fear”, he explained.
Witold Pilecki was sentenced to death and got shot in the head on May 3, 1948 at age 47.
Sources: polska-zbrojna.pl
Image: wietrzneradio.com