Witold Pilecki

Witold Pilecki (Polish:; 13 May 1901 – 25 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.