WITOLD PILECKI--THE ULTIMATE ANTI-WUSS

One unfortunate consequence of ethnic jokes against people of Polish descent is that they obfuscate the fact that there have been numerous Poles who have had cojones the size of bowling balls who have committed incredible acts of heroism and bravery. One such example is Captain Witold Pilecki.

Pilecki gallantly served as a young soldier in the Russo-Polish war of 1919-1920. Although this by itself is a notable achievement, it is not enough to distinguish him from numerous others who also participated. In 1939, he fought Germans and, in collaboration with Major Jan Włodarkiewicz, established a resistance group known as the Polish Secret Army, which spread across the country—again, a very courageous thing to do, but by itself not necessarily the stuff of legends.

However, Pilecki really demonstrated his mettle in 1940, when he deliberately allowed himself to be captured by the Nazis so that he could be incarcerated in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Once in the camp, he enlisted the help of other prisoners to do things to things which would have really gotten him into a fecal-load of trouble with the Germans if he had been caught.

His first task was to infiltrate the administration of the camp, where prisoners were often put in charge of running various functions under the supervision of the Nazis. By doing so, he was able to place his co-conspirators under one roof with a more benevolent Kapo (a prisoner appointed by the Nazis to oversee other inmates) and access to better food and medical care.

He then built a short-wave radio which the conspiracy used for several months in 1942 to communicate with the Allies about conditions in the camp. The radio was hidden in the hospital, where the Nazis usually did not tread, but it eventually had to be dismantled when one of the conspirators got too talkative.

He organized several escapes from the camp, including an exploit which could have come straight from a Hogan's Heroes episode, where four of the prisoners, armed and dressed up as SS officers, stole the camp Commandant’s car and blithely drove out of the camp in broad daylight. He used the prison escapees to transfer additional information to Warsaw and ultimately to the Polish government in exile in London.

The camp had a “suggestion box,” where prisoners seeking to suck up to the Nazis and receive favorable treatment could submit the names of fellow prisoners who had committed infractions. Pilecki's group was able to intercept the contents of the box on a regular basis and replace the names of the anti-Nazi prisoners with the names of the most malevolent ones.

Pilecki's group also assassinated the most dangerous of the prisoner informants. The Germans were not all that concerned about an occasional murdered prisoner in a death camp, although they did frown upon the practice if they themselves were not doing the murdering. However, Pilecki's group also wanted to get rid of the most inhumane representatives of the SS. Killing or incapacitating German soldiers and getting away with it was a far more daunting task than killing prisoners. The group nonetheless achieved this goal without suspicion by raising a colony of typhus-infected lice and turning them loose on the Germans.

In late 1942, Pilecki had a thousand prisoners under his command and formulated a plan for taking over the camp from the Germans and freeing all of the inmates. However, he could only do so with the assistance of the Polish authorities and supplies to be air-dropped by the Allies. The Allies ignored his request, so the escape never occurred.

Pilecki, through the use of his clandestine radio and his reports carried by escapees, was the first to inform the Allies about the crematoriums and the use of Zyklon B in gas chambers. The Allies refused to believe the reports and thought that they were just exaggerations promulgated by the Polish government in an attempt to get more support.

Eventually, Pilecki escaped in 1943 and presented his information in person. The Allies still believed the reports to be exaggerated and still did nothing.

Pilecki then participated in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and fought gallantly against the Germans. He was captured and held as a prisoner-of-war.

After the war, he was repatriated. His grateful government tortured, tried, and executed him in 1948 on trumped-up charges and buried him in a secret location. His real crime was that the Soviet overlords of Poland believed that he was going to be a trouble-maker and plot against the Communist regime. The overlords' belief was most likely well-founded. 

Outside of his native country, Pilecki's name and story are essentially unknown. However, his tale and many others equally compelling was found at the exhibit which had been on display through December of 2016 in Abilene, Kansas at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum entitled Be Ye Men of Valour: Allies of World War II.