The Auschwitz Volunteer

In September 1940 Polish army captain Witold Pilecki volunteered to be imprisoned at Auschwitz. Unlike us, he had no idea of what he was going to be facing. The linked piece on him is both fascinating and disturbing. He spent the bulk of the war smuggling reports out of Auschwitz, only to have them greeted with disbelief by the Allied commanders who read them. One of the portions they detail from the book is his account of witnessing what happened when an execution went wrong. The executioner was a psychopath who enjoyed jabbing his victims in the heart with a needle full of poison. He messed up the dose on one victim who later got up, walked towards the executioner saying, "You didn't give me enough. Let me have some more." The executioner pistol whipped him to death. Pilecki watched one guard order girls to strip naked and run around him in a circle, while he picked them off, one by one, with his pistol.

He eventually escaped from the camp, joined the Polish underground, and was captured during the Warsaw Uprising, and wound up in a POW camp. After the war, he settled in Italy and wrote an account of his experiences during the war, before engaging in a spying operation in Poland, where he was captured, and executed for his actions. I don't know about you, but I think I know the next book I'm going to read.

:bamf:

Just started reading this. I've read other accounts by people in the camps and this is easily the most disturbing.

You know what the Holocaust deniers will say though.

No, what has @Archangel been saying?

I still don't trust ANY Germans.

Betcha @gturner gets here first.

I'd read a review of Pilecki's book somewhere, and it's on my list. It's easy for later generations, even with the best intentions, to broad-brush the Holocaust. "All Germans were evil, all Poles looked the other way and did nothing." Countless individual stories say otherwise, the most well-known being Schindler's and Raoul Wallenberg's. Most are written by survivors like Eli Wiesel who had no say in their fate. Wallenberg was a volunteer whose story was pieced together by others after his presumed death. But the first-person record from beyond the grave of someone like Pilecki who volunteered to step directly into the abyss is a perspective worth learning.

I'm nearing the end. By 1943 he had an organization large enough and well enough equipped that they could have taken control of the camp. They could have taken control of the camp. They didn't because they were waiting word from London of help from the Allies. The Allies didn't believe what was in the reports, so they wouldn't agree to air drop weapons and supplies. Even without those supplies and weapons, they still could have taken control of the camp.

There are no words...

That's what I just don't get. We got in the war "a day late and a dollar short". You can't tell me that we had all these spies and all this intel (because we knew what might be coming our way) that we couldn't check the veracity of what was happening. Sorry, not buying it.

Believe it. The U.S. was well aware of the "Jewish problem," and was more than willing to welcome the Freuds and the Einsteins, but not ordinary people fleeing Germany. Look up the MS St. Louis and the Bermuda Conference for starters.

Ask the children fleeing mass murder in Central America being screamed at by "Americans" on the border today what kind of mindset this involves.

And what are we doing at the border to keep the Central American mass murderers from coming in along with the children fleeing them? Why, not a single darn thing.

Start a separate thread where you name them and explain how you know who they are.

I've been to the halocaust museum in D.C. I saw how we turned a whole boatload of Jews away to return to inevitable death. Fucking pathetic.

That was the St. Louis.

Thanks I couldn't remember all the details. But I couldn't believe it when found out about it.

There's a movie about it, Voyage of the Damned:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075406/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Incredible cast. You can probably find it on Amazon.

That's not even the half of it, really. Pilecki was over 40 years old when he escaped from the camp, and the only reason he escaped was that he was due to be transferred to Buchenwald, and since he didn't know what the odds of him surviving in the camp would be, he figured he'd take his chances on the run. Agonizingly, this book is his preliminary report to his superiors made just after the war. He wrote it in a rush because the Polish government-in-exile wanted him to go back into Poland and document what the Soviets were up to after the war. There are things which he covers in the barest of details, that had he had the time to flesh them out, would have proved invaluable, not only in elucidating what it was like inside the camps, but would help anyone in a similar situation. Pilecki was a god among men.

Its easy for us to say that now, but prior to the liberation of the death camps, I don't know if we could have believed what Pilecki was saying.

Hell, I had a teacher in High School whose grandmother grew up on the East Coast and knew nothing aqbout the Japanese internment camps right here in the United States until she was in her sixies.

Like @garamet said, people knew, but didn't care. We knew as far back as the mid 30s, but were so intent on being as isolationist and possible after WWI and most liekly never would have entered the war if Pearl Harbor didn't happen.

Will definitely be reading this soon. Also looking forward to this: Unbroken.

It has the bizarre quality of being the most well-documented holocaust in history. There's new information emerging all the time.

Eisenhower insisted on showing the camps to the Germans after the war, because he didn't want the Germans to have any excuses about what happened in the camps, and Pilecki described how they would "clean up" the camps before civilian groups would inspect the camps during the war, because they were suspicious about what was happening.

Anna, find a copy of the book, even if you have to pirate it. Pilecki was the perfect soldier (and by that, I mean someone who could not only follow orders, but successfully improvise when they were in a situation no orders could possibly cover), and its a disgrace to humanity that he's not better known. I've read accounts by other people who've been in Auschwitz, as well as other equally horrific camps in different wars, and Pilecki's account is by far the best at telling someone how they can survive in such a situation. His actions not only saved himself, but a large number of others in the camp. The only thing that he should have done differently (and its no one's fault that he didn't), was that when he realized that they had enough people on their side, he should have given the order to take the camp.

I cannot, nor can anyone else really, do justice to the book and what the man accomplished during his time there. The average life expectancy for someone in the camps was six weeks, Pilecki was there for three years. Sadly, we know from the Balkan Wars that such camps didn't cease to exist in 1945. If more people knew about Pilecki, then such camps probably wouldn't last long, once they were established.

Book is available on Kindle for $11.49.

It's not just taking the word of one man. Surely before, during and after wars we have spies everywhere. Maybe tackling the task of stopping mas extermination was biting off more than we could chew.

Pilecki talks about after he escaped and rejoined the underground in Warsaw being shown reports from other people who were inside the camps that matched his descriptions. None of them had photographs of what was going on, and its one thing to read the accounts on the page, and its another to see photographs of what was going on. We've seen the pictures, and read the accounts, so we know what was happening. Those during the war only had the reports, so it must not have seemed quite as horrific to them.

I literally just finished the book, and I'm reminded of that scene in Patton where he's watching the battle between his forces and Rommel, and saying, "What a waste of such magnificent men." The Poles wasted Pilecki when they sent him back into Poland to spy on the Soviets in 1946. I know that they were desperate to find out what was happening in the country and to try and get the rest of the world to oppose Stalin's occupation of Poland, but Pilecki should have been allowed to complete a much more detailed report of his actions inside the camp before the Poles sent him back.

One of the things which the book makes very clear, even if Pilecki doesn't say it, is that people in camps like Auschwitz should not expect help from the outside. Even after he got out, Pilecki was trying to convince the folks in the Polish underground to let him organize a raid on the camp, but they were more concerned about stopping the Germans as a whole, than the liberation of one camp.

Now, no doubt, had Pilecki and his men taken control of the camp from the Germans, they couldn't have expected to have held the camp for very long, because without a doubt, the Germans would have immediately ordered an overwhelming attack on the camp that Pilecki and his men couldn't have resisted. Still, for those hours which they would have held the camp, they could have done a number of things for those being held inside. The sewers were known to be a good escape route (Pilecki had originally planned to get out that way, but was forced to use a different method when the time came) and the prisoners who got out that way would have found a willing populace to help hide them. The gas chambers and crematoriums would no doubt have been wrecked by both the prisoners after they liberated the camp, and by German forces as they retook the camp. This would have slowed down the mass killings by the Germans, and no doubt, Hitler's desire to punish the Polish people would have hampered the overall war effort to a considerable degree. Pilecki estimates that around 8,000 people a week were killed in the camp, and had the prisoners taken control of the camp in '43, its possible that over 800,000 lives might have been saved.

Oh, and I want to point out that despite everything that he'd been through, Pilecki was still able to maintain a sense of humor. He had used an assumed name when he was arrested in 1940, during his escape, he was shot in the shoulder (the bullet passed clean through without hitting bone), he and his companions, weak and exhausted, had to walk for days to reach a town where they believed they could find safety, all the while, dodging German patrols. They reach the town, find the sanctuary they had been looking for, and Pilecki asks to meet the local resistance leader. It turns out, that the man (Tomasz Serafiński) was the man who's identity Pilecki had "borrowed" when he went into Auschwitz. Upon meeting Serafiński, Pilecki does not say, "Hi, I'm Witold Pilecki, I used your identity in Auschwitz." instead, he pretends to be Serafiński! (Which leads to, "But I'm Serafiński!", "No, I'm Serafiński!" for a few moments until Pilecki let's him in on the joke.)

And in reading Pilecki's Wikipedia entry, I really wish that there was a detailed biography of him in English.

@Tuckerfan, it's only 44 pages, but there's this: http://www.amazon.com/CAN-LIVE-LONG...e=UTF8&qid=1419104888&sr=1-2&keywords=pilecki

Kindle only, $1.99.

Looking at the cover photo, I'm thinking someone should bring this man's story to Leo DiCaprio's attention.

Hollywood needs to get their hooks into this!
We could have witty dark humor and catch-phrases and so on.
Like when our hero arrives and the captives are showing him around he can snarl
"yeah.....this place looks like a real gas!"
And maybe a tag-line - "five ovens and no waiting".

Posted while I was posting mine. Definitely.

Whoa! He does look like DiCaprio! WTF?

DiCaprio's already played Howard Hughes, Frank Abagnale, and J. Edgar Hoover. Biopics are his strong suit. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Which makes it shorter than his book on Auschwitz.

Hollywood's planning a movie, but details are scarce. There's a History Channel program that's ostensibly about him on YouTube. It is more about what happened to Poland during the war, than Pilecki, but it does have interviews with one of his children and his nephew. (It also gets a couple of things wrong.)

DiCaprio would be a good choice to play him, but I don't know how far he'd be willing to go for the role. In Body of Lies, DiCaprio gets tortured, but still looks "too pretty" for what his character had to endure. Pilecki had to endure not only numerous beatings, but starvation, overwork, and disease. DiCaprio would at least need to starve himself for the role, if he really wanted to look the part.