Volunteering For Auschwitz

Mark Stoler over at Things Have Changed updates and reposts the story of Captain Witold Pilecki , who volunteered to go to Auschwitz when it first opened in 1940 to learn what it was and gather intelligence for the Polish Home Army. He was there for two-and-a-half years coming close to death twice, before deciding to escape and bringing out his plan for liberating the camp.

It took four months for Pilecki to cautiously make his way across Poland, finally reaching Warsaw and the Home Army.  To his bitter disappointment, the proposal for the attack was not endorsed by the Home Army leadership which did not have the arms, ammunition and transport to carry it out.  The Poles made an attempt to gain logistical support for the operation from the British, including bombers and planes to carry airborne troops.  They sent Pilecki's 11 page report to the British who dismissed it, believing the report to be a gross exaggeration, and declining to help. 

That is a common story of disbelief in the West, not crediting the reports brought from Germany and especially the Bloodlands of Eastern Europe. There is ample evidence of real information making it to the highest levels of power in Britain and America, especially from the other David Wyman , the Holocaust scholar from UMass Amherst. But whether people "knew" is a slightly different question.  Our ability to not see and not believe what we do not wish to be true is present at every point in our "dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime." The first courage is to see oneself. Pilecki himself wrote in his report "Camp was a proving ground of character. Some - slithered into a moral swamp.  Others - chiseled themselves a character of the finest crystal."

In the Battle for Warsaw Pilecki was captured and sent to a German POW camp.  He was liberated in 1945 but went immediately to the Polish Guard in Italy to fight the communists.  He was secretly executed after a  show trial in 1948. 

... a former prison guard who watched over Witold during his imprisonment approached the Pilecki family, telling them "I want to help you because your father was a saint  . . . Under his influence, I changed my life.  I do not harm anyone anymore."