Meet the Polish soldier who told the world about the crimes of Nazism (Photo)

The 1939 war veteran, infantry and Catholic commander Whitold Pileck, was planning to infiltrate the camp and organize a resistance movement against Nazi invaders. The idea was formulated after forming along with his commander, Major Włodarchywitz, the Polish secret army, Tap, an embryo of the resistance movement to continue the war after Poland's conquest and later to return to the secular National Army that led to the Warsaw uprising.

Some of Tap's first members were captured and sent to Auschwitz and therefore decided to infiltrate the camp to try to release them. Under the plan, Pilecki would find a false identity and new documents would be seized during “łapanka-s”. From inside Auschwitz, he would collect information and organize former military and volunteer volunteers into a militia.

And he did. Pilecki/Serafiński arrived 39 years old at the camp, recognised several paramilitary structures, identified former army members and organised them into the Union of Military Organisations, ZOW in Polish. ZOW was tasked with collecting information - members maintaining morals, smuggling food, sending reports to the National Army and the Polish government in London using a self - prepared radio and preparing a prison uprising for the release of the camp.

The organisation was based on smaller cells, within the camp, made up of five members known as the “fifth to”. These cells were not familiar with each other so that the fall of one did not result in the fall of all. Only Pileck had a general view.

According to Polish historian Adam Cyra, Edward Cieseseyk, a ZOW member describes its beginning: “I became a member of a cladestinian organization in Auschwitz. After a pile of bricks and after several construction barracks, before a camp carpenter and the mayor of the Polish army, Trooniciki swore allegiance to the organisation.” The submitted reports were the first information to be revealed to the world about the horrors committed in Auschwitz against Jews, but also against political prisoners, or even any with different religious beliefs, as well as members of Roma minorities and shinti, Russian prisoners, and Jehovah's witnesses.

Up to that point, little was known about Auschwitz, which was regarded as a prison camp of huge size and not a destruction camp in the service of <x0 final resolution” conceived by Adolf Hitler, until it was exposed by ZOW. Of course, released prisoners and escapeers had information and coded data even though this practice was extremely dangerous.

Of course, camp authorities were beginning to understand what was happening and were willing to dismantle the network, which resulted in April 1943 Pileck decided to escape after the murder of a considerable number of his members.

His escape was so surprising to courage as it was funny in simplicity. The undercover agent and his two associates neutralized a guard, cut off telephone lines and escaped from hell without the need for tunnels, explosions, or strategies.

Pilecki joined the National Army, an international organisation loyal to the Polish government in Britain and realised detailed and final information for his three years in Auschwitz. It estimated that 1.5 million people were missing, a number similar to those estimated after the war. Unfortunately, he explained that the camp was highly supervised to begin a uprising, and with the sole support of the National Army since even the Allies were far from Poland, the idea was abandoned. There were other resistance operations. In August 1944 The National Army implemented Operation Storm, a series of national uprisings against Germans among which Warsaw was most important. The guerrillas attacked the invaders' troops over 63 days, while the nearby Russian army slowed the advance and apparently left the city in German hands. In the end the National Army was defeated and Pileck was captured, this time against his will.

He was transferred to a prison camp, not that of extinction, and he stayed there until he was freed from the Americans at the end of the war. In later years he and his associates faced another invading force - that of the Soviet Union.

When Hitler's forces invaded Poland in September 1939, Joseph Stalin's troops did the same from the east and divided the country into two parts. At that moment the two forces were allies. The Georgian dictator had even ordered his tanks to hold back a few miles from Warsaw in the middle of an uprising in 1944, leaving the Germans on the triunphon. Pileck was captured once again and tried by Poland's new communist authorities. He was executed in May 1948. His last words were: “Roft Poland free! ” / f.a. /The world.al