Witold Pilecki arrives at Auschwitz

On 19 September 1940 German gendarmes searched houses in Warsaw’s Żoliborz district and led men out of their flats. It was one of many roundups with which the occupier filled prisons and camps, but caught in this net was a man who could have avoided it and did not want to. In a flat at 40 Wojska Polskiego Avenue the Germans were awaited by a reserve cavalry second lieutenant, Witold Pilecki, an officer of the clandestine Secret Polish Army (PL). He carried papers in the name of Tomasz Serafiński and one task: to get into the concentration camp in Oświęcim, organise a resistance network there and pass out news of what was happening. Two nights later, as one of more than fifteen hundred men detained in Warsaw, he arrived at Auschwitz and was given the number 4859. He spent nearly two years and seven months there.

An officer from the Kresy in the Warsaw underground

In 1940 Pilecki was 39. He was born in 1901 in Olonets in Karelia, into a noble family exiled deep into Russia after the January Uprising, grew up in Wilno, fought as a scout and volunteer in the Polish-Soviet War, and in the interwar period farmed the family estate of Sukurcze (PL) near Lida. He was a landowner, a community activist and a reserve officer, not a professional soldier. In the September Campaign he commanded a divisional cavalry platoon of the 19th Infantry Division (PL) in Army “Prusy”, and after its destruction fought on as part of the 41st Infantry Division in south-eastern Poland. He did not go into captivity: in October 1939 he disbanded his unit and made his way to Warsaw.

There, on 9 November 1939, he co-founded the Secret Polish Army, an organisation set up by Maj. Jan Włodarkiewicz (PL) from a group of soldiers and Catholic activists and from a circle of students of the Warsaw School of Economics gathered around Jan Dangel. Pilecki became its organisational inspector and later chief of staff. The TAP was one of dozens of conspiratorial organisations that arose in the occupied country alongside the Service for Poland’s Victory being built by Gen. Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski and Stefan Rowecki, and its successor, the Union of Armed Struggle. It recognised the government in exile but did not recognise Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski’s authority and operated independently; according to studies, in mid-1940 it could count more than ten thousand members.

A camp for Poles

The concentration camp in Oświęcim had operated since June 1940. The Germans established it in former Polish army barracks in Zasole, in a part of the country incorporated into the Reich, and its beginning is taken to be 14 June, when the first mass transport arrived: 728 Polish political prisoners from the prison in Tarnów. Rudolf Höß became commandant. It was then above all a camp for Poles – for arrested members of the resistance, representatives of the intelligentsia, participants in attempts to escape west to the Polish army, and people detained in roundups. On 15 August 1940 the first large transport arrived from Warsaw.

Little was known in Warsaw about what happened behind the wire. In August 1940 the Gestapo arrested several people from the TAP leadership, among them Lt. Col. Władysław Surmacki (PL) and the physician Władysław Dering, who were sent to Auschwitz. The organisation’s leadership concluded that someone had to get to them, make contact with the prisoners and investigate whether they could be helped, or perhaps even whether the camp could be liberated. The task fell to Pilecki.

The circumstances of this decision are not entirely clear, and historians dispute whether the idea came from Pilecki himself or from his superiors. The camp historian Adam Cyra points out that there was a dispute within the TAP leadership at the time, among other things over subordinating the organisation to the ZWZ, and that sending Pilecki out of Warsaw may also have had this dimension. According to some biographers Pilecki hesitated until he met the ZWZ commander-in-chief, Rowecki “Grot”, from whom he received an order. There is no doubt, however, that he walked into the roundup voluntarily and knowing where it led.

The roundup in Żoliborz

One could not report to the camp. One had to be arrested, and in such a way as not to be immediately recognised as a conspirator, shot, or shut up for a long interrogation in the Pawiak prison. Pilecki used a document in the name of Tomasz Serafiński. The real Serafiński had left his document with a doctor in Warsaw in 1939, and the conspirators reissued it with Pilecki’s photograph. This false biography was to protect him from being linked with the TAP and with his own family.

On 19 September the Germans carried out a large roundup in Żoliborz. Pilecki was then in the flat of Eleonora Ostrowska at 40 Wojska Polskiego Avenue – a commemorative plaque hangs there today. When the gendarmes searched the building, looking for men aged 18 to 40, he did not try to hide. Those detained were taken to the barracks on Szwoleżerów Street, where they spent two nights. For the Germans it was one of many ways of intimidating the capital and supplying people to the camps; for those caught, mostly random residents of the city, it was the beginning of a road from which many did not return.

The night on the ramp

On the night of 21-22 September 1940 those detained in the roundup were brought to Oświęcim. This was the so-called second Warsaw transport; various sources and accounts put its size at between about 1,700 and about 1,850 people. Some publications give the night of 20-21 September, but the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and most of Pilecki’s biographers give the night of 21-22 September. The new arrivals had their clothes and personal belongings taken away, and instead of names they were given numbers. Pilecki – registered as Tomasz Serafiński – received the number 4859.

Conditions in the camp were murderous. Prisoners were forced into exhausting labour expanding the camp and demolishing the surrounding houses, and punished with beatings, “sport” and the bunker; the kapos and block seniors were German criminal prisoners brought from Sachsenhausen. The first escape, by Tadeusz Wiejowski, succeeded on 6 July 1940. On 22 November 1940 the SS for the first time shot a group of 40 Poles in the camp. According to studies, from July 1940 to March 1941 at least 2,500 people died or were murdered in Auschwitz.

The Union of Military Organisation

In the camp Pilecki found people from the TAP who had been arrested earlier, and as early as October 1940 he formed the first “five” of the conspiracy, which he named the Union of Military Organisation (PL). According to the findings of the Auschwitz Museum, it consisted of Władysław Surmacki, Władysław Dering, Jerzy de Virion, Eugeniusz Obojski and Roman Zagner. The organisation was based on mutually independent five-person cells – the members of one did not know the others, so that the exposure of one five would not bring down the rest. Pilecki chose people across political divisions – as he wrote later, he treated them as a soldier treats soldiers, regardless of pre-war party sympathies. The ZOW included officers and non-commissioned officers of the Polish Army, pre-war activists, students and scouts.

The ZOW’s tasks were at first modest and at the same time the most important for survival: to sustain the prisoners’ spirits, pass them news from outside, and obtain and distribute extra food, clothing and medicine. The second aim was sending information out, the third preparing units that could seize the camp if partisans struck from outside.

Pilecki sent his first report in October 1940, through a prisoner released from the camp – such releases still occurred at that time. Within a few weeks the message reached the ZWZ command and Rowecki, and in March 1941, through an underground communications post in Sweden, London.

What came of it

The ZOW grew. In 1941 and 1942 other conspiratorial groups in the camp joined it, and according to various estimates its network eventually covered several hundred, perhaps even around a thousand, prisoners. From the autumn of 1941 it operated in a common structure with the camp’s ZWZ network, and reports from the camp – carried out by released prisoners, by civilians working in the camp and residents of Oświęcim, and finally by escapees – informed the underground of crimes against Poles, against Soviet prisoners of war, and from 1942 of the mass murder of Jews in the gas chambers of Birkenau. Pilecki was promoted to lieutenant in the camp.

In the spring of 1943, when the camp Gestapo began to get on the trail of the conspiracy, and old prisoners with low numbers were being transferred to other camps, Pilecki concluded that he had to escape. On the night of 26-27 April 1943, at Easter, he escaped with Edward Ciesielski and Jan Redzej from the bakery where they worked the night shift, and reached Nowy Wiśnicz, where he found the real Tomasz Serafiński. He had spent 947 days in the camp. The plan he had prepared for a strike on the camp from outside was rejected by the AK command as unworkable, and Pilecki himself described what he had seen in reports that are today among the most important testimonies about Auschwitz – especially in the extensive report (PL) written in Italy in 1945.

Voluntarily entering a concentration camp, about which ominous rumours were already circulating in Warsaw, made Pilecki one of the best-known figures of the Polish underground. In his lifetime, however, his story did not reach a wide public: after the war, arrested by the communist security service, he was sentenced to death and executed in 1948, and for decades his name was passed over in silence in People’s Poland.