Polish war hero Witold Pilecki was executed

Polish war hero Witold Pilecki was executed 

On May 25, 1948, Witold Pilecki was executed by communist authorities, in the Rakowiecka detention center after a show trial. 

During World War II, Pilecki volunteered for a Polish resistance operation that involved being imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp in order to gather intelligence. At Auschwitz, 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 work for British intelligence). Pilecki was executed after a show trial in 1948. The story of Pilecki's mission in Auschwitz was told in Fighting Auschwitz (1975) by emigre Polish historian Józef Garliński, himself a former Auschwitz inmate. Information about his exploits and fate was suppressed by Poland's communist regime until democracy returned to Poland in 1989. Pilecki's story did not become widely known until after the 1990s.

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." 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." 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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Woolly mammoth

Image
***Farmer finds woolly mammoth bones in Michigan field, stashed by Ancient Natives*** Though buried for thousands of years, the partial skeleton of a woolly mammoth found in Lima Township indicates that the animal actually ended up on the dinner plate of a Native American. “It’s too early to tell how it died but the skeleton showed signs of butchering,” said Professor Dan Fisher of the Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan. The remains were found by James Bristle, on the soy bean farm that was owned by him. When he first encountered the remains, he thought it was an old fence post, but it turned out to be about 20 percent of a woolly mammoth, including the skull, jaw, vertebrae and ribs, that died between 11,000 and 15,000 years ago. The site holds “excellent evidence of human activity,” Fisher said. “We think that humans were here and may have butchered and stashed the meat so that they could come back later for it.” Mammoths and mastodons — another extinct elephant-lik
Read more

The first case of shell-shock

Image
"It was while I was in this Field Hospital that I saw the first case of shell-shock. The enemy opened fire about dinner time, as usual, with his big guns. As soon as the first shell came over, the shell-shock case nearly went mad. He screamed and raved, and it took eight men to hold him down on the stretcher. With every shell he would go into a fit of screaming and fight to get away. A much larger number of soldiers with these symptoms were classified as 'malingerers' and sent back to the front-line. In some cases men committed suicide. Others broke down under the pressure and refused to obey the orders of their officers. Some responded to the pressures of shell-shock by deserting. Sometimes soldiers who disobeyed orders got shot on the spot. In some cases, soldiers were court-martialled. It is heartbreaking to watch a shell-shock case. The terror is indescribable. The flesh on their faces shakes in fear, and their teeth continually chatter. Shell-shock was brought about i
Read more