Dan Snow's History Hit - The Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz

Episode Date: January 19, 2020

In 1940 the Polish resistance decided it needed to send an agent to Auschwitz concentration camp. They were desperate to find out what was going on in a place that even by that stage of the war had an evil reputation. Historian Jack Fairweather tells the story of Witold Pilecki the Pole who volunteered for the job. He smuggled out first accounts of the camp to the rest of the world. He chronicled its transition from a concentration camp for Polish political opponents to a factory of genocide.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan's Nice History Hits, another remarkable story of resistance from the Second World War today on the podcast after we had the extraordinary story of the Dutch resistance heroines earlier in the week. Please go and check that podcast out. Today we are talking about the Polish resistance, in particular one extraordinarily brave Polish freedom fighter, Witold Pilecki, who volunteered, yes, volunteered to go to Auschwitz and find out what was going on there. Auschwitz concentration camp, which would transition as the war went on into a site of industrial slaughter, a site of genocide. And Witold Pilecki was an eyewitness to that slaughter. And he was the first person to warn the outside world what was going on.

In this podcast, you'll hear from historian Jack Fairweather, telling me the story of this absolutely extraordinary human being. Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army 75 years ago this month. And we've got a lot of Holocaust-related material coming out over the next couple of weeks. It's absolutely fascinating. You can listen to it here on the podcast, or you can go to historyhit.tv, our new digital history channel. If you use the code POD6, exclusive for podcast listeners, you can check out all the material on there for six weeks, absolutely free of charge.

In the meantime, everyone, here is the story of Witold Pilecki. Thanks very much for coming on the show. A pleasure Dan, thanks for having me. It's a big story. It's a big hero that I got to follow in the footsteps of. Tell me briefly why is he such a big hero? Vito Pilecki volunteered for a mission to Auschwitz. It's a completely mental story. He went there at the camp's inception when it was a concentration camp for Poles. Whilst there, he created an underground organisation that became the first to report on the Holocaust that unfolded in Auschwitz. Why is this story not known about in the UK? Is he a big star in Poland? He's become one. His story was repressed.

At the end of the war, he went back to fight against the communists in Poland. He was captured and executed and all trace of his wartime record hidden or destroyed. And it was only in the 90s with the collapse of the Iron Curtain that some of his stories started to emerge in Poland. And his family discover what a hero they had. He hadn't spoken, he kept it secret of course, his mission in the camp. So it's taken years for his story to emerge in Poland and now I got to write the first biography of him in English. When we think of the Holocaust we think of Auschwitz. What's the importance of Auschwitz? Auschwitz became the epicenter of the final solution. It became a collection point for

Europe's Jews for their extermination and it's become a symbol really of mankind's darkest act of evil and it's essential that we remember that legacy. The final witnesses of the Holocaust are dying. Soon there will be no living memory of Auschwitz and I think stories like Pilecki's, who arrived in the camp before it became a death factory, slowly pieced together the Nazis' intentions and witnessed the horrors. It's essential that we hear his story and remember because we're losing that living touch with Auschwitz. And we mustn't forget. So 80 years ago this year, in September, the Germans invaded Poland, shortly followed by the Soviet Union. What was Plessy doing in that brief but fairly heroic resistance to not one but two despots that were invading?

He was a father of two, a landowner in eastern Poland, a reserve officer in the Polish cavalry. So he was on horseback with his men riding to meet the German advance. And perhaps predictably, they were annihilated like much of the Polish military fought a valiant rearguard action but ultimately there was nothing they could do against the sheer force of the Wehrmacht and their new blitzkrieg tactic. So

he then headed to Warsaw to begin a resistance cell and with a group of men they recruited, grew and expanded and this incredible underground organisation, which isn't very well known about in the West, started to take shape. The first resistance to the Nazis and it was partly in response to this underground that the Germans created the Auschwitz concentration camp. They wanted to start rounding up military age poles and locking them away. And the underground turned to Pilecki and said, you know what, we need to find out what's happening in this camp. A few rumors were reaching Warsaw of terrible brutality. Witold, can you go? And the title of my book is The Volunteer. That sort of suggests that Vytaut was,

you know, hands up, choose me. In fact, of course, he had a real dilemma on his hands. His wife and kids had snuck out of eastern Poland that was occupied by the Soviets and reached a safe house outside Warsaw. He had to think about their safety, of course he had to think about his own safety, but in the end he made that momentous decision and he sat in an apartment in Warsaw where he knew there was going to be a roundup and waited for the Germans to burst in and seize him and take him to Auschwitz. Wow, so he got in by, he didn't sneak over the wire? He didn't sneak over the wire, he sat and waited and one of the most amazing moments of my research was going to that apartment in Warsaw. A lot of the city was destroyed in the subsequent uprising but that apartment was not and I had the great privilege of going back there with

one of the people who was in the apartment when Pilecki was seized. It was his sister-in-law's apartment and on that morning when the German trucks rumbled up there was a three-year-old boy there, his nephew, and I met up with him, you know, 80 years later and took him back to that apartment. He'd never been and the communists had taken it over at the end of the war. So this is his first time back. And he remembered moments. He was only three at the time, but he remembered this one little detail about how as the Germans came storming up the stairs, he dropped his teddy bear on the floor, he was in his crib at the time, and Pilecki picked it up, handed it back to him. And just one of those moments that for me spoke to Pilecki's amazing ability to reach out to others

in times of great distress when you think he would be only thinking of himself. He was trying to empathise with that little little boy and Marek, the nephew, remembered his sort of final words as he stepped into captivity, final words as he stepped into captivity, see you later. And yeah, it was pretty special taking him back there. And what I tried to do for the book was then follow Pilecki's footsteps, you know, back to Auschwitz and then during his extraordinary escape from the camp and then followed him back to Warsaw, to that cataclysmic Warsaw Uprising that spelled the end of the Polish underground and the destruction of much of the city.

What was the date when you got to Auschwitz? September 1940. And was Auschwitz at that point a work camp, concentration camp, death camp? What was going on there? Yeah, it's a really important point to make because I think a lot of people, myself included, before beginning research, think of Auschwitz as the death factory that it became. September 1940, it was a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners. There were Jews in the camp, Polish Jews,

but they were not seized specifically because they were Jews, but just part of these general roundups which was mostly Catholic Poles and when Pilecki arrived there were about 5,000 prisoners there already this is about two or three months into the camps existence and Pilecki's first job was to survive. He thought he was going to go in there and start smuggling out messages and creating an underground but of course the camp was already on the track towards the Holocaust, a place of huge brutality. Pilecki describes arriving in Auschwitz and seeing 10 prisoners just shot in the head right in front of him. He's beaten and pummeled, brought into the camp and stripped and shaved and given a prisoner number instead of his name. All part of this process of dehumanisation that was essential for the SS to turn prisoners into chattel.

prisoners into chattel, also essential as they started their experiments in how to kill that was to lead to the Holocaust. And that's one of the reasons why Pilecki's mission was so important was that he got to witness these steps by which the Nazis arrived at the the final solution in the camp. He describes arriving as if it was stepping into another world, into a dream. Like a lot of prisoners, they were just stunned, cowed, unsure how to respond. All the old rules, the old moral order upended in the camp and Pilecki struggled. He struggled to find that sort of moral center that he needed to begin recruiting. Fortunately a couple of his colleagues in the underground had already reached the camp and he managed

to track them down and they gave him the basis, the information he needed, the courage he needed to begin recruiting and the early resistance was really based around just helping other prisoners. There was not enough food, they were all on starvation rations so Pilecki helped distribute food evenly among the prisoners. He realised, of course, though, that this wasn't his mission, this wasn't going to stop Auschwitz, he needed to start fighting back, and that's when he came across this first huge dilemma, which was how to alert the West to what was happening in the camp. How do you get a message out of Auschwitz?

And, you know, Pilecki, really one of the great problem solvers that I've encountered, escaped, he realized, impossible because, you know, guards everywhere, prisoners were gunned down as they approached the barbed wire, and indeed any prisoners that did get away led to huge reprisals against other inmates. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories

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And if so, why had he done it? That is a great question. And he didn't know what Auschwitz was. The Nazis didn't know what Auschwitz was. The Nazis didn't know what Auschwitz was to become. You know, this was, his story was to discover the steps by which Auschwitz became that death factory. He did have, of course, a sense, though, that it was a place of brutality, that people were dying there, and it was one hell of a mission. So why did he do it? Pilecki was a man of huge patriotism, deep faith. He was also someone who had a really incredible

ability to judge people's character. His job in Warsaw before going to the camp was to be a recruiter. There was a lot of hot-headed Poles wanting to take up arms around the Germans and lots of arrests and shootings. Pilecki had to work out who were the young men who could keep their cool, those who would make good operatives. And it was that talent that persuaded the underground to pick him. And I think it was that talent that Pilecki realised that he actually had something to offer, that he could go to Auschwitz and create an underground cell there. Crazy as it seems to us today.

So he goes to Auschwitz, he's looking at this petri dish of unimaginably evil experimentation. How does he start to create contact with the outside world? He learns that a prisoner is going to be released. The prisoner came from an aristocratic family whose hunting lodge had been used by Hermann Goering before the war. And the right bribes and connections had been made. The man was going to be set free. So Pilecki tracks him down through an underground colleague and persuades him to carry a report

to Warsaw. He couldn't write anything down, way too dangerous, so he has him memorize a report and no one has ever found that report until my researcher tracked it down. It was one of those, you know, sort of eureka moments in the research. We knew the name of the messenger, Alexander Vilopolsky, and had then found his son, who was an 80-year-old gentleman living in Warsaw. He had no idea that his father was the first messenger of Pilecki's, the first to bring news of the camp's horrors to the outside world, but he did have this one name of the man he thought his dad had stayed with in Warsaw, Dembinski, and armed with that name,

my researcher in the archives in London was able to sift through the thousands of missives from the Warsaw underground and find the one report, the one folder rather, that contained the story of how Pilecki's message went from Warsaw to London. Where the Polish government in exile were. Where the Polish government in exile were, where the Allied command was, which of course at this time in late 1940 was just the British standing alone against the Nazi might. And she found the correspondence then between the Polish

underground government and RAF command. That is amazing! It is really amazing and the message itself is in some ways even more amazing and when my researcher read it to me over the phone it gave me sort me goosebumps to hear Pilecki's voice, because it speaks to both his desperation and his clear-sightedness. This is what he had to say. Polish government, for the love of God, get the British to bomb this camp. Even if it means everyone dying in it, we have to stop what's happening in Auschwitz. And that was in October 1940.

That message was read by Charles Portal, the head of the RAF, in January 1941. And it's really one of history's great might-have-beens. What would have happened had they heeded Pilecki's message then. You know, Charles Portal and the head of bomber command, Richard Pearce, had a conversation, debate about whether to do it, and they didn't. Meanwhile, Pilecki is still in the camp. Pilecki came down with pneumonia during that brutal winter of 1940-41. He had no word from the outside world about what was happening, he didn't know what these debates

were. One of his men managed to set up an illegal radio station in the makeshift camp hospital so they could catch bits of the BBC. A rather amazing moment to think of them sort of dialing the knobs and listening to... This is London. Here is London. Oh, there was actually the German language service, so it would have been here is England. But anyway, Pilecki spoke German, which was very helpful and one of the tricks to survival in the camp. But he carried on reporting because the war was about to go through this massive change that was to place Auschwitz very much front and center of Nazi thinking. And that was the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

And Auschwitz was intended to become a huge collection point for Soviet prisoners of war, a huge slave labor operation in a new camp called Birkenau. As we now know, that didn't transpire. The Germans didn't subjugate the Soviet Union as they intended. But what happened was that they had a huge labor camp built and no one to put in it. That's when the Holocaust and Auschwitz's role in the Holocaust began to take shape. And Pilecki was reporting on all of this. His men stole reports from the SS architect's office and smuggled them out of the camp.

They got hold of SS records, chronicling the numbers of prisoners coming in, the numbers of fatalities which they were smuggling out. At one stage, even incredibly, he stole the parts needed to make a Morse transmitter radio. And so as the first Jewish transports began arriving in the camp, he and his men were there tapping out messages, trying to tell the world what was happening. And he didn't stop. He struggled to understand Nazis intentions,

starting with the first gas experiments that were directed against the few thousand Soviet prisoners that did make it to Auschwitz and then of course against Jewish families. You know he couldn't grasp immediately the genocidal intentions of the Nazis. There was no word then for the Holocaust. Pilecki simply called it a new nightmare in his reports. But of course he did come to understand the full horror and for me it was a fascinating struggle seeing him get to grips with the Holocaust. I think it's something that everyone who reads World War II history, reads about the Holocaust,

has to do. Get their head around how it was possible to kill millions of people, why, and the nature of the Nazis' evil. And Pilecki was in some ways the first to tackle about those questions to try and put them into words and it also led to some just spectacular operations by Poletsky he realized that what was happening in Auschwitz had reached a new scale of horror and that it was worth risking escapes to get out messages and he organized one of the most amazing

escapes by one of his messengers. I think that you know from any concentration camp during World War Two four prisoners broke into an SS warehouse just outside the camp gates and stole four German officer uniforms, dressed up as SS men, marched over to Commandant Hoess's garage, took one of his cars, and drove out the main gates. On the way, they met the deputy commandant riding on his horse, and they gave him a sort of Heil Hitler, and he saluted them back, and then off they drove. What's incredible to think is that this escape

was carrying the first evidence of the Holocaust to the West. Pilecki's messenger, this young man called Stanisław Jasta, broke away from the other escapers to deliver his report to Warsaw. And Jasta sadly didn't survive the war, but one of those escapers did. In fact when I was researching he was still alive, 96 years old, Kazimierz Piakowski, extraordinary gentleman who I had the great honor of interviewing in Gdansk and he recounted to me that escape and gave me the details of when the messenger broke away from the others. With that date, I was able to track down then Pilecki's report about the Holocaust in the

Warsaw archives and read that extraordinary witness statement, that extraordinary call to arms to try and stop the Holocaust. Pilecki, you know, he didn't ask to bomb the camp. He realised that wasn't happening. Instead, he asked for the Brits to send the Polish air brigade that was being trained in Scotland at the time to parachute down onto the camp to attack it. Crazy plan, it speaks to his desperation at the time and his sort of pursuit of finding some means to get the Allies to attack the camp and it became a really difficult time for Pilecki. Autumn of 42, early 1943. He'd been in the camp for over two years at that point and he built up an underground of a thousand men. They were carrying out these extraordinary escapes.

They were risking their lives to copy and report and document the Nazi crimes and nothing was happening. And, you know, Pilecki was actually wracked with a sense of guilt at this time, that, you know, that he was alive and so many people around him were dying. And he describes in post-war reports this moment of seeing a family outside the crematorium by the main gate at the main camp and seeing a ten-year-old boy in the group that was the same age as his son at the time and they lock eyes. Pilecki knows they're going to be executed, the family knows they're about to get executed and he's haunted by that boy's eyes that night and for the rest of his time in the camp. It becomes the inspiration for him to perform his final great act of heroism in Auschwitz which is to arrange his own escape. Incredibly dangerous, even harder

because he's arranged so many escapes for his men, he couldn't take Kommandant Hoese's car this time. Instead he hits upon a, you know, a crazy plan to break out of a bakery that's operated by prisoners. There's a night shift and it involves him forcing open the door and legging it essentially and having to make it a hundred miles across Nazi-occupied Poland to a safe house, you know, a little more than, you know, a few scraps of bread and in his prison stripes. But that's what he feels he has to do because he comes to this realisation that the only chance he has of persuading the Allies to attack Auschwitz is if he does it himself. It's the last thing he can try.

It's a sort of personal plea to the Polish underground to take action. So that's the remarkable sort of denouement of his story in the camp and you know I tried to recreate the escape because you know one of those questions, well the question I always have with Pilecki's story is how in the world did he manage to do that and one of the ways I found have with Pilecki's story is how in the world did he manage to do that? And one of the ways I found to answer that question was to follow in his footsteps. So the same day, the same hour, I went to the site of that bakery, it no longer stands, and staged my own escape from the camp. I knew that he had crossed the Vistula River at dawn, so by sort of legging it at a fairly crisp pace at 2am in the morning, I was able to sort of get a rough idea

of exactly where it was that he crossed the river. He gives a few names of the towns that he stopped off on and hid in on his sort of epic journey to safety. And I went to those towns and it's one of those great joys of the research. You know, I show up with my notebook and my researcher and asking questions about Pilecki and lo and behold a couple of old ladies come up and say, oh yeah, I knew Pilecki, he sheltered in my parents' house.

I was four or five at the time and they took us in and gave us cake and tea as is customary and you know there was just this wonderful sense of shadowing Pilecki that we were sitting in the same room where he had had you know tea and cake and lo and behold here we were with the family members who had been with him then in turn giving us their memories of the sort of bedraggled man who had knocked on their door at midnight. So Pilecki makes it to the safe house and then begins his efforts to attack the camp. He can't persuade the undergrounds locally that they should. In fact, they actually think he's a German spy. You know, they can't believe he's escaped the camp.

It's so unlikely that they're like, well, he must be here since a sort of, as an agent provocateur. And, you know, Pilecki comes up with an idea that just him and a few of his mates are going to bust through the camp gates and try and you know create a diversion long enough for the underground and the camp to stage an uprising. It's a mad plan which he's finally dissuaded from by the head of the underground in Warsaw who says look, Auschwitz we've got your reports, we know it's important, but things are happening in the war. This is 43, 44, the Soviets are now rolling back the Germans, Soviet occupation of Poland is looking increasingly likely.

This is the same Soviet forces that had helped begin World War II by signing a pact with Hitler to divide the country. They're going to be no friends of Poland. And so the Underground's focus is really how to stake their independence against the Germans, against the Soviets. And that becomes the genesis of the uprising. So there are no spare troops, no spare capacity to deal with Auschwitz. The whole focus then is on saving Poland and, you know, Pilecki reluctantly agrees with them. He writes the first of his sort of long reports about his time in the camp. Amazing document.

The first attempt to really grapple with what's happening in Auschwitz, to write the history of Auschwitz. And then he plunges into the Warsaw Uprising. Which is a disaster for the Poles. The destruction of Warsaw. The Soviet forces refuse to get involved. They let the Poles. The destruction of Warsaw. The Soviet forces refused to get involved. They let the Poles burn themselves out against the Nazis and then move in to claim the wreckage.

What happens to Pilecki? Just briefly, how does the story end? Does he end up fleeing to the West or, as you say, in Poland? He ends up being captured again by the Germans. I mean, what a moment to think of the man who spent two and a half years in German captivity, having to once again face internment again. And he's liberated by U.S. troops in a concentration camp in Bavaria in 1945.

And he teams up then with the Polish Second Corps, which is this force that had fought alongside the British in Italy. Second Corps, which is this force that had fought alongside the British in Italy. And it's there that he hatches this plan to go back to Poland and start gathering evidence of communist crimes, the style of Soviet crimes, against the Polish population. You know, no rest for Poleski. So he goes back in winter of 45, back to Warsaw and starts up a cell, starts work all over again. And it's one of the, for me, the tougher parts of the research is seeing Poletsky really struggle with coming to terms with Poland after the war, coming to terms with his own estrangement from his family and his wife. He never spoke to her about what had happened in the camp.

She only knew that he was there on some sort of mission. And his work against the communists meant that he couldn't really stay with the family, so he would see them very occasionally. And then of course the hardest part of all, the fact that he was betrayed by fellow Poles to the communist authorities that led to six months of very brutal torture and finally his trial and execution. And it's a real testimony to Pilecki. At the end of his trial, he's been given the death sentence

and it's customary for political prisoners like himself to then plead for mercy, sort of admit their crimes to the court in the hope of clemency. And Pilecki's invited to the dock and they say, so what have you got to say for yourself? And he says, I'm not sorry for anything I did. I die, I'm going to die knowing I did the right thing. Thank you very much. And that's it. And he's shot a short while later and then his reports are hidden and buried. And yeah, buried and yeah that's where they've been 50 years. You can go to the archive now in Ealing where his longest report sat for decades, you know

smuggled out of Italy where he wrote it and largely sort of unread and all of the archival material in Warsaw that was hidden by the communists is now available and it feels to me time that this extraordinary man should be celebrated for his feats in the camp and his you know it's a real inspiration for how you can hold to your moral compass in the most darkest of times. Well, your book certainly does that. What's it called? The Volunteer. Thank you very much for coming on the pod.

Thanks, Sam. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do it to me

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the law of the jungle out there and I i need all the fire support i can get so that will boost it up the charts it's so tiresome but if you could do it i'd be very very grateful thank you