| Auschwitz gate. The sign above it says, "Work makes you free." |
Escaping from Auschwitz would not be easy.
The camp was divided into subcamps, and each subcamp was ringed with electric barbed wire. SS guards and attack dogs were stationed every few meters--nobody had any qualms about shooting escapees on sight, regardless of age or gender. Security was so tight that one Commandant said inmates would only be freed through the crematorium chimney.
Thankfully, Witold Pilecki found a gap in their defenses. Auschwitz had a bakery. And the bakery had a back door.
He and a two other members of the resistance, Jan Redzej and Edward Ciesielski, managed to get jobs there. Using a piece of dough they took an imprint of the nut holding the door, then found the appropriate wrench and managed to break out.
Only two SS men were on guard that night. Shots were fired, but no one was hurt. Somebody had cut the phone lines previous to the escape, and there was nothing the Germans could do except watch their prisoners disappear into the night.
“How fast we were running, it is hard to describe,” Pilecki later wrote. “We were tearing the air into rags by quick movements of our hands.”
They kept going until they reached the Vistula River, which is a journey of roughly 529 kilometers. Or 238 miles.
After several days of travel, Pilecki arrived at the Vistula. Boats were docked by shore, secured with chains, which they were able to break off using the same wrench as before. However--this part is a little ambiguous--Pilecki didn’t get on the ship. I suppose they let it float away, so that when the missing boat was reported the Germans would think that they had gone down the Vistula.
Whatever the case, the three continued their trek through the forest.
During the course of their travels, the threesome unwittingly crossed paths with German soldiers. They ran, of course. But Pilecki was shot in the arm. Thankfully they weren’t too far from their final destination. The next morning found them safe inside the home of a fellow inmate’s stepparents.
Everybody dies. It’s just a matter of when and where and why.
After the war, you’d think that Pilecki would settle down with his family. He had survived Auschwitz, for goodness sake. His wife and kids were waiting for him. But when the Soviets invaded Poland he was once again called to serve as an espionage agent. This time, he would be fighting the Polish Communist regime.
Ironic, that he should escape from the Nazis only to be killed by his own countrymen.
Witold Pilecki was captured, tortured, interrogated and finally executed on May 25th, 1948. The Communists censored his name from historical records, and banned his children from higher education. Nobody really knew much about Pilecki until after the collapse of the Berlin wall--but recently he has been receiving some well-deserved recognition.
In 2006 he posthumously received the Order of the White Eagle, the highest possible decoration in Poland. A movie, entitled Operation Auschwitz, is currently in the production stages and several books have been published about him. NPR did a special on Pilecki as well, which you can listen to here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129956107
“Having a beautiful wife and two kids that he loved dearly, he decided to leave them behind and go to a concentration camp in Auschwitz,” said Marek Probosz, the actor who played Pilecki in a Polish film. “Human beings were the most precious thing for Pilecki, especially those who were oppressed, and he would do anything to liberate them. To help them.”
| Witold Pilecki and his family. |
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