pilecki

Witold Pilecki (13 May 1901 – 25 May 1948; Polish pronunciation: [ˈvitɔlt piˈlɛt͡skʲi]; codenames Roman Jezierski, Tomasz Serafiński, Druh, Witold) was a Polish cavalry officer, intelligence agent, and resistance leader. During World War II, he volunteered to be captured by the Nazis and embedded in Auschwitz concentration camp, to understand the nature of the camp, which was not known at the time. After his escape several years later, he wrote Witold's Report, the first comprehensive intelligence report on the atrocities of the Holocaust.He was born in Karelia, where his grandfather had been forcibly resettled from Poland by the Russian tsar after supporting the January Uprising in 1863. Pilecki served as a cavalry officer in the Polish Army in the Polish–Soviet War and World War II. He was also a co-founder of the Secret Polish Army resistance group and later a member of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa).
In 1940, Pilecki volunteered for the Polish resistance operation to infiltrate Auschwitz. While there, he organized a resistance movement within the camp which eventually numbered in the hundreds, and secretly sent messages to the Western Allies detailing Nazi atrocities at the camp. He escaped in April 1943 after nearly 2½ years of imprisonment.Pilecki later fought in the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944. He remained loyal to the London-based Polish government-in-exile after the communist takeover of Poland. In 1947, he was arrested by the secret police on charges of working for "foreign imperialism", referring to his war time work for the government-in-exile, and was executed after a show trial in 1948.
Information about his exploits and fate was suppressed by Poland's communist regime until democracy returned to Poland in 1989, after which his story began to become widely known. The story of Pilecki's mission in Auschwitz was told by emigre Polish historian Józef Garliński, himself a former Auschwitz inmate.Pilecki is now considered "one of the greatest wartime heroes". Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich writes in The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery: "When God created the human being, God had in mind that we should all be like Captain Witold Pilecki, of blessed memory." Ryszard Schnepf, Polish ambassador to the United States, described Pilecki as a "diamond among Poland's heroes" and "the highest example of Polish patriotism" in 2013.British historian Norman Davies writes: "If there was an Allied hero who deserved to be remembered and celebrated, this was a person with few peers." Pilecki himself described his struggles and exploits as simply the moral and patriotic duties of a Catholic, and a Polish patriot.

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