Witold Pilecki (1901–1948)

Witold Pilecki was born in Karelia, Russia, where his Polish family had been forcibly resettled by Tsarist Russian authorities after the suppression of the January Uprising of 1863-1864. In 1910, the family moved to Wilno (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) where Pilecki joined the secret ZHP Scouts organization. In 1918, during World War I, he joined Polish self-defense units in the Wilno area. He later joined the regular Polish Army and fought in numerous battles, including the liberation of Wilno. During World War II, as a soldier of the Second Polish Republic, he was a founder of the Secret Polish Army Polish resistance group, and a member of the Home Army. In 1940, Pilecki smuggled himself into the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz under a false name and began recruiting members for an underground resistance group that he organized into a coherent movement. He sent information about what was going on inside the camp and confirmed that the Nazis were working to exterminate the Jews, using a courier system that the Polish Resistance operated throughout occupied Europe to channel the reports to the Allies. In 1943, after having spent 2½ years at Auschwitz, Pilecki realized that the Allies did not plan to liberate the camp before the end of the war. He escaped with two other prisoners that led to a Gestapo manhunt for them. In 1944, Pilecki was captured while fighting in the Warsaw Uprising and spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp. He then joined the Free Polish troops in Italy in July 1945 and agreed to return to Poland and gather intelligence on the country's takeover by the Soviets. Pilecki was caught by the Polish Communist regime, tortured, and executed at Mokotow Prison in Warsaw in 1948. The details of his heroism did not emerge until 40 years later, after the collapse of Communism in 1989. Pilecki was posthumously awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta and the Order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish decoration.