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  THE AUSCHWITZ VOLUNTEER : BEYOND BRAVERY

  THE AUSCHWITZ VOLUNTEER

  Beyond Bravery

  by Captain Witold Pilecki

  Translated by Jarek Garliński

  AQUILA POLONICA (U.S.) LTD.

  10850 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 300, Los Angeles, California 90024, U.S.A.

  www.AquilaPolonica.com

  Copyrights © 2012 Jaroslaw Garlinski and Aquila Polonica (U.S.) Ltd.

  All rights reserved. The moral right of the author has been asserted. First published 2012.

  Published in both hardcover and trade paperback 2012. eBook edition published 2014.

  ISBN (Cloth): 978-1-60772-009-6

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  ISBN (Trade Paperback): 978-1-60772-010-2

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-60772-014-0

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Library of Congress Control Number 2012931262

  eBook Conversion: Sellbox.com

  Acknowledgements:

  Cover design, interior book design and maps in this Aquila Polonica edition are by Stefan Mucha, and are reproduced with permission. Photographs and other illustrative material are reproduced with permission, and are from the collections of the following:

  The Archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (“ABM”); Bundesarchiv; Jarek Garliński (“JG”); Stefan Mucha (“SM”); Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (“NAC”); Zofia Pilecka-Optułowicz and Andrzej Pilecki (“Pilecki Family”); The Polish Underground Movement (1939-1945) Study Trust (“PUMST”); United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (“USHMM”); and Yad Vashem (“YV”).

  The publishers wish to extend special thanks to Zofia Pilecka-Optułowicz and Andrzej Pilecki for sharing their family photos for use in this book, and for the cooperation of the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (“IPN”) and the Muzeum Woli (“MW”) in providing access to such photos.

  The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration is abbreviated as “NARA.”

  The views or opinions expressed in this work, and the context in which the images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, nor imply approval or endorsement by, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

  Publisher’s Note:

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper, broadcast, website, blog or other outlet.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  The game which I was now playing in Auschwitz was dangerous. This sentence does not really convey the reality; in fact, I had gone far beyond what people in the real world would consider dangerous...

  — Captain Witold Pilecki

  EUROPE 1939

  © 2012 Aquila Polonica

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Norman Davies

  Foreword by Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland

  Translator’s Introductory Note

  Publisher’s Note

  Selected Highlights from Pilecki’s 1945 Report

  List of Maps

  Historical Horizon

  Captain Witold Pilecki: The Report, the Mission, the Man

  Captain Pilecki’s Covering Letter

  to Major General Tadeusz Pełczyński

  Captain Witold Pilecki’s 1945 Auschwitz Report

  Appendices

  1 Glossary of English, German and Polish Terms and Acronyms

  2 German-Language Positions and Ranks at Auschwitz Mentioned by Pilecki

  3 Index of People and Places Referred to by Pilecki with Either a Code Number or Letter

  4 Chronology of Pilecki’s 1945 Report

  Index

  Discussion Questions

  Videos

  Praise

  About the Author and Translator

  Also From Aquila Polonica Publishing

  POLAND – SEPTEMBER 1939

  1st of September 1939

  –

  German forces invade Poland from the north, west and south.

  17th of September 1939

  –

  Soviet forces invade Poland from the east.

  28th of September 1939

  –

  Germany and the Soviet Union agree on the demarcation line partitioning Poland between them.

  OCCUPIED POLAND 1939–1941

  INTRODUCTION

  Misconceptions about the Second World War in Europe appear to be endless; everyone, including the most advanced experts, can always learn something more and increase the precision of their understanding. One basic misconception, for example, concerns the moral framework of the war; many Westerners imagine that the war in Europe saw just one evil regime, the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler, which was opposed by a coalition of democratic allies dedicated to freedom, law and justice. In reality, the largest combatant power of the war, the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, despite its differences from Nazism, can only be included in the criminal, mass-murdering category. Stalin began the war in September 1939 as Hitler’s partner in crime, and made no effort to restrict his evil practices when the Soviet Union had been attacked by Germany in June 1941. All the countries like Poland which lay between Germany and the Soviet Union felt the lash of both their neighbours, and at war’s end they were denied any meaningful liberation. As Captain Pilecki1 understood very well, the only valid moral stance was to oppose Nazism and Stalinism alike.

  Another common misconception concerns the scourge of the concentration camps. Many Westerners continue to imagine that concentration camps were somehow a monopoly of the Nazis; they equally fail to make the important distinction between concentration camps, like Dachau or Majdanek and fully fledged death camps, like Treblinka. Few of them realise that the Soviet ‘liberators of Auschwitz’ were busy running a massive network of concentration camps of their own. In reality, the Russian acronym, the GULag, stands for “State Board of Concentration Camps”. All the indications are that Soviet instruments of repression consumed more human beings than their Nazi counterparts.

  Pilecki’s third Report on Auschwitz was written in 1945 at a time when his fight against German tyranny had ended and when his fight against Soviet tyranny was about to begin. It is a poignant reminder of the double threat which Europe faced in the mid-20th Century.

  I myself became fully aware of the greatness of Witold Pilecki while conducting research on the Warsaw Rising of 1944. Here was a man, who almost single-handedly had held up the German panzers on one of Warsaw’s main thoroughfares for a fortnight; using the pseudonym ‘Roman’, he then disappeared into his dugout and continued the struggle until the Rising capitulated over two months later. Only then did I realise that this was the same heroic character, who four years earlier had deliberately arranged to be arrested by the SS and be transported to Auschwitz. In 1943, having engineered his escape, he wrote the first version of his Repo
rt on Auschwitz, which I had read and which had been the first of several attempts to inform the outside world of what was really happening. Pilecki was a Polish officer and Catholic who viewed his fight against his country’s oppression as synonymous with his patriotic and religious duty. If ever there was an Allied hero who deserved to be remembered and celebrated, this was a person with few peers.

  Yet Pilecki’s astonishing career did not end with the declaration of peace. He was put to death by an act of judicial murder, destroyed by a Communist regime which was working for Stalin’s interests and which treated all non-Communist resistance fighters as traitors and Nazi-lovers. Pilecki’s name mirrors the tragic fate of millions whom the West forgot. Only when one grasps the true horror of his fate can one comprehend what the Second World War in Europe was really about.

  Norman Davies, FBA

  Oxford, Great Britain

  February 2012

  Pilecki Family

  Witold Pilecki-1922.

  1 The name Witold Pilecki is pronounced VEE-told pee-LETS-kee.

  FOREWORD

  During World War II, a time of unprecedented darkness on earth, heroic men and women rose up and, calling upon the highest resources of the human spirit, took action against evil. Many such people were thrust unwillingly into situations that challenged them physically, emotionally and morally, but they rose to meet the challenge. Others, a much smaller number, actively courted danger in order to battle the evil.

  One who stands out in that unique, smaller company of heroes is Polish Army Captain Witold Pilecki, who volunteered for an almost certainly suicidal undercover mission at Auschwitz.

  Pilecki is a shining example of heroism that transcends religion, race and time. Yet his story, one of the most dramatic missions by an Ally in World War II, is virtually unknown in the West.

  Why isn’t Pilecki better known? There is a simple answer: his story was intentionally suppressed by the postwar communist regime in Poland—because Pilecki’s heroism did not stop with his nearly three-year-long Auschwitz mission.

  After his escape from Auschwitz, Pilecki worked in intelligence with the Polish Home Army, fought in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and was taken prisoner by the Germans. He ended the war in a German prisoner of war camp. Then in late 1945, he volunteered for another undercover mission: to return to Poland, where conditions were chaotic at war’s end as the communists were asserting control, and secretly gather intelligence for the Polish government-in-exile.

  This, tragically, became his final mission. Pilecki was arrested as a Western spy by the Polish communist regime, tortured, and executed in 1948 at age 47. His heroic exploits were expunged from Polish history.

  Now, for the first time, English-language readers will have a chance to discover, through his own words, this remarkable man who risked everything to organize against the unspeakable evil of Auschwitz and tell the world about the horrible realities of this now-infamous death camp. If heeded, Pilecki’s early warnings might have changed the course of history.

  Pilecki’s eyewitness account covers the early period in Auschwitz’s existence: from September 1940, shortly after the Germans opened the Auschwitz concentration camp, through April 1943 when Pilecki escaped. His report provides firsthand information about less well-known aspects of Auschwitz—e.g., its initial function as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners; the extermination of Soviet soldiers taken as prisoners of war; the first intimations and subsequent execution of the Nazi German “final solution” for Jews, which began in earnest in 1942.

  Pilecki’s experience and observations provide a perspective that fills in the overall picture of Auschwitz. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the Holocaust. It is also, perhaps unintentionally, the portrait of a man of conscience faced with unimaginable horrors, as Pilecki opens what is supposed to be a strictly factual account with these words:

  They have told me: “The more you stick to the bare facts without any kind of commentary, the more valuable it all will be.”

  Well, here I go... but we were not made out of wood, let alone stone, though it sometimes seemed as if even a stone would have broken out in a sweat.

  When God created the human being, God had in mind that we should all be like Captain Witold Pilecki, of blessed memory. May the life of Witold Pilecki inspire us all to do one more good deed, of any kind, each and every day of our lives.

  Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland

  Warsaw, Poland

  December 2011

  Pilecki Family

  Witold Pilecki-1930’s.

  TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTORY NOTE

  This translation is based on the original typescript of Captain Witold Pilecki’s 1945 Report held at the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust in London.

  In fact, this report was the third and most comprehensive one that Pilecki wrote on his time in Auschwitz. In June 1943, shortly after his escape from the camp, while staying with the Serafińskis in Nowy Wiśnicz, Pilecki wrote an eleven-and-a-half-page initial report. A few months later, in the autumn of 1943, in Warsaw, he wrote an amplified version, called Raport W, and he wrote the full Report, here translated, in the summer of 1945 in Italy where he was serving with the Polish Second Corps, under overall British command. This report, as Pilecki’s covering letter to General Pełczyński makes clear, was written primarily for military purposes.

  Throughout both Raport W and the 1945 Report, but only in some places in the June 1943 report, Pilecki replaced the names of most of the people to whom he refers in the text, whether camp inmates or others, and of many of the places, by numbers and sometimes letters. This was done to protect their and their families’ identities, which continued to be relevant even after the war had ended in 1945. Pilecki’s own keys to the June 1943 and the 1945 Report have never been recovered. Painstaking research by a number of scholars, including my late father Józef Garliński and Adam Cyra of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, managed to break the 1945 code and establish the names of most of the people mentioned.

  In the spring of 1991, some years after much of the original detective work had been done, an almost complete key to the names (over 200 out of 235) in the autumn 1943 Raport W was discovered in archives in Warsaw. It was returned to Pilecki’s son Andrzej, together with some of his father’s other papers which had been taken at the time of his arrest in 1947. However, the numbers in this key do not correspond to the numbers in the 1945 Report: for instance, in the 1945 Report, Colonel Władysław Surmacki is no. 1, in Raport W he is no. 8; Colonel Juliusz Gilewicz is no. 121 in the 1945 Report and no. 72 in Raport W.

  There are also a few factual discrepancies between the three reports, and I have noted the main ones in footnotes to the text. I have used Adam Cyra’s invaluable book, Ochotnik do Auschwitz: Witold Pilecki (1901–1948) (Oświęcim: Chrześcijańskie Stowarzyszenie Rodzin Oświęcimskich, 2000), as the most up-to-date source for the identified names, which I have included in the body of the text in square brackets.

  In this translation I have chosen to retain Pilecki’s somewhat staccato style, with many words and phrases in parentheses and quotation marks. I have tried to be as faithful to the original as possible, retaining Pilecki’s colloquialisms and inconsistencies, bearing in mind that the Report was written quite hastily. However, I have taken the liberty, in one or two instances, of introducing a new paragraph or section where Pilecki did not, but where a radical change in subject matter appears to warrant it.

  Occasionally Pilecki’s memory plays him false and I have taken the liberty of pointing this out in footnotes. I have also corrected the spelling of the odd German word or two. Where he has used a German word or camp argot, I have nearly always used them too, translating where it has seemed to me to be appropriate.

  A word about place names, Polish being well known for its daunting tongue twisters, such as Brzeszcze, Brzezinka, Oświęcim, Wiśnicz. Where there are accepted English-language versions I have used them, examples bei
ng Birkenau, Minsk, the Vistula, Warsaw. However, I use the more evocative Kraków in place of the rather flat English rendering Cracow, for which I have never much cared. Following the same principle that one does not, for instance, translate the “Bois de Boulogne” into English as the “Boulogne Wood,” I have not translated street names, although I have used the English word “Street” in lieu of the Polish “Ulica.”

  While it has become common of late to refer to the Warsaw Rising of 1944, I must confess to preferring the older form, Warsaw Uprising.

  It was my late father, Józef Garliński, himself an inmate (number 121421) in Auschwitz for a few months in 1943, which he spent in the Penal Company, who first brought Witold Pilecki to the attention of a wider audience in his ground-breaking book Oświęcim Walczący published in 1974. It appeared a year later in English as Fighting Auschwitz. It was in fact the first work by a serious historian on the resistance movement in Auschwitz and involved much detective work in breaking Pilecki’s name code. Hence my great debt to him.

  I should like to conclude by thanking Dr. Krzysztof Stoliński of The Polish Underground Movement Study Trust in London for his kindness in making the text of the Report available and for his patience in answering some follow-up email questions. Dr. Adam Cyra of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum has also patiently responded to my queries. Finally, many thanks to my editors at Aquila Polonica, Terry Tegnazian and Stefan Mucha, for their helpful suggestions and attention to detail.

  Jarek Garliński

  Texas

  February 2012