The Spy Who - The Spy Who Infiltrated Auschwitz | Pilecki’s Great-Grandson on the Man Behind the Mission | 4

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Krzysztof Kosior was thirty when he first felt ready to visit Auschwitz. But since childhood, he had heard stories of his great-grandfather’s time there, and of his journey from unknown soldier to one of Poland’s greatest heroes. Talking to actor and spy novelist Charlie Higson, Krzysztof reflects on his family’s memories of Witold, and on the surprising struggles of those with the Pilecki name. Plus he takes listeners inside what happened when Witold met Tomasz Serafinski, whose identity he used during his time in the camp.Have you got a spy story you’d like us to tell? Email your ideas to [e-mail] NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/spywhoTry it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and ad free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. From Wondery, I'm Charlie Higson, spy novelist, actor, comedian, and this is The Spy Who. actor, comedian, and this is The Spy Who. Thank you for joining us for our final episode of The Spy Who Infiltrated Auschwitz. It's a harrowing story, probably the hardest we've covered yet. Polish Resistance soldier Witold Pilecki voluntarily entered Auschwitz and was imprisoned there for nearly three years. His mission was to build a network that could tell the world the truth about the camp. But when his intelligence reached the Allied forces, nothing happened. There was no rescue, no action.

So his mission changed. He either had to accept death or escape in order to show the world the full horror of Auschwitz. After his escape and after the war, life in Poland continued to be full of conflict. The Soviet Union's power over Poland grew ever stronger. Witold fought this communist takeover until May 1947, when he was arrested by the secret police. A year later, he was executed, and his story was all but erased from history by Poland's communist government. But the extensive report Witold wrote about Auschwitz survived him, and when the Soviet

Union dissolved, his work came to light. In this episode, I'm going to speak to Krzysztof Koszar, Witoitold Pilecki's great-grandson. Born in 1983, Christoph learned about Vitold through stories told by his grandmother Zofia, Vitold's daughter, and his great-grandmother Maria, Vitold's wife. You just realized your business needed to hire someone like yesterday. With Indeed, there's no need to stress. You can find amazing candidates fast using sponsored jobs. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates, so you can reach the people you want faster. And just how fast is Indeed?

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Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. So, hello, Christophe, and welcome to the podcast. And thank you so much for joining me today. Do you do a lot of this sort of thing, talking about your great grandfather? Hello and thank you for having me. Not that much. It happens sometimes, especially I joined my grandmother in some trips to some schools, for example. So it's not like my everyday thing to do.

We'll look into the story of VTOLed as a spy in Auschwitz a little later. But for now, because we have you and we have that personal connection to V.Told, what sort of a man was he? Well, he was like, I would say, three different kinds of person at the same time. Like, officially, yes, he was a military man. Then he was a kind of, I don't want to call it a social worker, but someone who who is really bonding together the local society. And then he was also the kind of spy, which was unofficial, yeah. So we do not really like the word spy in

Polish because it has some negative connotations. And so did your family talk about him a lot? What sort of stories did they tell about him? It was quite interesting because I was a little bit brought up also by his wife, so my great-grandma, Maria Pilecka. Did she tell you about how she met him, how they got together? When he met my great-grandmother, Maria, he was very, so he had to fight for her. He was the cavalry man and she had some other guys around her, military pilot for example.

So that was some kind of competition between them. He was approaching her very directly. He was sometimes riding full speed on his horse and throwing a bouquet of flowers into her window. So he figured out what kind of flowers she likes. And then he was just getting huge bouquets of those flowers. This was this competition with the airmen. And he saw it once that this guy is at Maria's place because his bicycle was there.

He had like a small military airfield, some, I don't know, six miles, eight miles away. So he was cycling there and he saw the bicycle. So he asked one of the guys to take it back to the military base because he said, well, the pilot should be flying airplanes and not cycling. So I can imagine this guy was really surprised when he went out and the bicycle wasn't there and probably relieved when he found it back at his airfield. But yeah, it was kind of a very direct approach, I would say. You were talking about the different sides of Vito's life, the military side and the

domestic side. Did some of his military side come into his domestic life in the way he ran the household? My grandma remembers that it was a little bit like a military drill, I would say. So when you were getting to the breakfast, you should have your hands washed, sit straight and tell your father, yes, I'm ready to receive the porridge, for example. Because Maria was working in the school and he was staying at home. So he was also taking care of the children quite often. But presumably that can't have been a very long part of his life, is how quickly he got

involved in, obviously, as the Second World War loomed. He had so little time with them, and half of it was just letters being sent from somewhere. But they remember him very fondly, and they both, Zofia and her brother, Andrzej, they think that he really brought them up this way. This little moment they had together and the letters. But obviously they missed him a lot. Yeah. Do you have family photos from that time? We do some, but just a few. Yeah, like most of them really stayed in the East and are lost.

So your grandmother, that's Zofia, yes? Yes, Zofia. That's Witold's daughter. Did she know much about the secret side, that side of his life? No, I don't think so. I think they were oblivious. They knew that he is organizing some kind of a horse riding force, so this was more like official, but the intelligence part was totally unknown to anyone in the family. Yeah, obviously this being a podcast, being audio, we can't see VTOLT. Can you just describe him, what he looked like?

He was like average, that's what's in most descriptions, yes, that he was very average. Not really anything very special about him, quite quiet, rather big forehead, would I say. Yeah, I guess intelligent eyes, which would look at you and try to figure out what kind of person are you. He sounds like he had the perfect character for being a spy, really. It seems so, yes. So he didn't stand out that much, but also he was very approachable.

That was his thing that he could put many people together and make them work in the common cause. So where did you grow up, Krzysztof? And how far away is that from Auschwitz and the events of your great grandfather? Not that close, really. I was born and brought up in Warsaw then when I was around eight. I was moved like 20 kilometres south west from Warsaw, so to the countryside. But I went to Auschwitz camp when I was around 30 I think. So it took lots of time for me. I was pretty sure I don't want to go there for many years.

Why was that? I was convinced that I would not be able to feel it or understand it. I still do not understand it, how you can build something like that. When I was 20, I just felt, no, please do not force me to go there. And how was it within the family? Did they say, oh you should go and see Auschwitz? No, I never, it was probably that they thought that if I want I can, but they never told me that I should. So what a change for you when you did go, what caused you to change your mind? First I read the reports, so they were made available because they were coded before, so you could see like number 270 did something

and then he went to number 117. And it wasn't so good to read. So when they decoded it in the early 2000 years, I think, I read it twice and I thought it's extraordinary really story so complicated. And it also took me some years to prepare for it. But then I thought maybe it's time to go to Auschwitz camp and see it. The first time, there were lots of emotions.

So it's hard for me to describe in English, I guess. But it begins with some being a little bit numb, I would say. So you just sightseeing, yeah? Just like, oh, this is the place where they shoot people, this is the place they hang people, they lived here and blah, blah, blah. This gate is saying, Arbait Macht Freie, and this is the square they kept them for many hours, for example, in the snow, so, okay.

And then suddenly these emotions, like from within yourself or from the ground, they come to you, and you start to, you don't really know why, but they kind of overwhelm you. And the tears come to your eye and your throat just closes. Yeah. And I felt it the most in Birka now, yeah. So I came to, it was like just approaching.

It was already. I suppose Vitold himself must have had similar emotions when he went in in because he can't have expected, he can't really have known what it was like in there and what was actually happening and slowly unfolded and got worse and worse for as long as he was in there until he knew he had to get out. Yes, he had a not very warm welcome so he wrote that he lost one of his teeth because he didn't carry his number in his mouth as

the couple wanted. He put it in his hand and then they just hit him with a baton. He was there when this camp was changing from some kind of a prison, let's call it, like a work prison for people to really do something into this death camp along the years. He was there for 947 days, yeah, so that's a lot of time and I believe he really seen all these situations where his friends were killed, for example, in front of him and he could not react. That's, yeah, I believe he can do something to you also, yeah, like change you internally.

When you were in walking around camp number one, did you get a sense of the sort of footsteps of your great grandfather? Yes, it was quite interesting because I went also once with Jack Fairweather, so he's the author of one of the books and he described like he was making sure that everything he read in the report is, you can see it nowadays. You can read in the report, for example, they were walking on the alley of trees, like birch trees, I think, on the border of the camp. So I was trying to find that. Then there is the infamous wall where they were

doing the executions by shooting people. The bakery is non-existent anymore. Adam Cyra, so one of the historians who walks there, showed me where it was, but it was behind the outside of the camp and it's not there anymore. So when you came to read the report, was that part of your process of trying to understand what had happened and what came out of it for you? Could you get a sense of him writing in it? I mean, for sure it brought me closer to him, to know him a little bit. It's like 100 pages, so not that long, but it's written a little bit, I don't know the good word, maybe lightheartedly a little bit,

so it's not like totally... In some places it does push you to the ground, when he's describing these killings and so on, but sometimes there is some kind of a joke here and there. Some of his personality comes through in it. And tells a little bit about Witold also, yes. When you are in the hell on earth, then you try to grab at least something that's a little bit more lightly shaded.

Yeah. An extraordinary part of the story is that in order to hide his own identity, he took on the identity of Tomasz Serafinski and used his ID card. And then later on, he ended up meeting the real Tomasz Serafinski. Can you talk us through how that all happened? How that worked? Yeah, I laugh because if you put it in a movie script, it seems not possible to happen. Warsaw was bombed during 1939 when the Germans were attacking it. In one of the raised houses he found this ID card.

There was a good probability that this person, a military man, Tomasz Serafinski, simply died there. His document is there in the rubble. He used his identity because he said, okay, this guy died, but nobody knows about it officially. So he became Tomasz Serafinsky for this mission in Auschwitz. And then he spent there like more than two and a half years. And when he was escaping, he was going towards the city of Bohnia. He got information that they got one of the guides and he said, yeah, I will meet you with the local head of one of the resistance cells from the Home Army.

And his name is Tomasz Serafinski. And he was like, how is that possible? So yes, I have to meet him for sure. And they introduced themselves and the real Tomasz Serafinski gave his hand. Witold replied, Tomasz Serafinski, born on that and that day in that and that city. And he said, well, that's my info, yeah. And he said, yes, that's your info. But I have lived with this info quite, quite interesting three years. After the Second World War ended, the communist Polish government tried to erase Witold and his story.

His name was removed from public records, silenced in schools and in the media, and he went unknown by the Polish people and the world for many decades because he was considered a threat to the communist state. Why was he such a threat? I think it's because he was just pro-Polish. He was anti-communist in all his life and they, I mean the communists, they didn't want any local patriotism, Polish patriotism. It was supposed to be like a big Eastern bloc of many nations. All joined together against the threat of the Nazis.

Exactly, under the red banner and that's all. So he was against it, so we get rid of him. So when he returned home after the war, was he already someone that the authorities didn't want people to talk about? Yes, well his mission was to see what's going on here, what the Soviets are doing here, collecting information, what Soviets planned for Poland because no one really knew. Will they incorporate it in the Soviet Union or will it be still independent in a way? I suppose at this point in his life he was having to hide who he was and what he was doing as much as possible from the new regime, presumably just trying not to get caught. Officially in the city he was still someone else, he was using different identities. How was that for the family? How were they able to cope with that?

My grandma told me about it. She was like schooled at home to be or trained at home to not to be too emotional. Yes. And when he's there, he's just like some distant relative coming over and say, hello, mister, good to see you. Like finally you see your father after a long time and you're not supposed to hug him. Why? It is confusing for sure. As a father of three boys, I'm trying to imagine what that must have been like. That must have been very difficult, very painful. It's really hard to really comprehend what's going on. And then when they are not seen

by anyone, they can finally talk to their father, hug him and so on. And Vitold essentially chose country over family. And we talked before about these sort of three different sides of him that sort of compartmentalizing things that he can appear to be a completely ordinary family man, which he was. And even though he's surrounded by so much danger, he can somehow keep that to one side and being able to connect with his family when he's with them. Yes, I think he was trying to balance it in a way. In most cases, I am no spy master,

but that's probably what people do. Either they do not have any family or they have to, this is my work and this is my home, yeah, and family. And it became with the years harder and harder. This is actually the thing that his wife, so my grand-grandmother, wrote in the letter to the communist president, asking him for parole, that Witold

loved his country and this love overshadowed every other love for the family and so on. Just to convince them that he was trying to work for his country. And I think it was that, yes. So it wasn't like just simple crossroads where we have to choose family or country. It was many roads leading there. In 1947, Witold was captured by the communist Polish forces who accused him of spying for the exiled Polish government and also plotting the assassination of communist officials. That is untrue. And he was interrogated and tortured multiple times,

presumably to try and get a false confession out of him. And he was found guilty in that show trial. And what happened next? What was the family told about all this? No information at all. So my great grandmother or her sister, sometimes they just brought these parcels, food parcels or some basic package with something for the prisoners. And one day in 48, this little window opened and they said, Pilecki, no, he's not here.

He has left. Yeah. And it's closed. And then, you know, nothing about what happened to him. He left. What does it mean? He went somewhere or is he alive? No one knows. And this situation went on for many, many years. Really, I'm kind of astonished that not that much happened to us as a family, for example, because in the Soviet Union, if you got caught, the whole family would be killed or just exported to Siberia. My grandma, when she was in the school and the communists, they put these speakers in school.

So the most important information and propaganda was fed there during the break, for example, break time. And this speaker was saying, yes, the imperialist spy, Witold Pilecki was caught and he's on the trial and so on. And her teacher, so my grand teacher said to him, oh, Pilecki, do you know him? She was very proud to say, yes, he is my father and I am very proud of him. And then she was like made fun of and yeah, like a traitor, enemy of the state and so on.

So in general, it was really hard time for the family, especially that Maria, so my great-grandmother, she couldn't find any job. Yeah, she was a teacher but she wouldn't be employed because all the schools were afraid that if you employ someone like that, the Secret Service will come and make troubles. So she was really doing these very simple jobs. And then when someone found out that, oh, she's Pilecka, okay, let's get rid of her. And she later on, she went to one of those orphanages because there were so many children after the war who had no parents. And so there were these orphanages called ognisko. In this ognisko place, so this orphanage, she could get a position which was similar to

being a teacher, so maybe that's what she concentrated on. But in general, these few years were really something hard to move on with two little children. My grandma remembers picking up pine cones to burn them in the fireplace because it was in the winter, it's getting really cold. And if not for the family and some nice neighbors who would give them a bucket of coal, I don't know if they would survive at all. I mean, it's incredibly difficult being a single mother and labeled the wife of a traitor an enemy of the state.

Yes, and people were buying into propaganda because it was kind of forced. You could think, yeah, maybe it's not true, but you could not say that. So in general, the society was just under the Soviet boot and everyone could just tell the authorities that you said something or you're hiding something. And yeah, it was like psychosis in a way. So in terms of what the family is told, the guy at the gates to the prison saying he's not there is about it. That's about the only official information they get. Is there anything in the newspapers or anything like that?

No, the trial was many times mentioned in the newspapers on the first page because it was this propaganda to show people, yeah, we catch the imperialist Western spies over here. But then when the trial ended, we didn't know at all what's going on. It wasn't until 1990 that the family found out the truth. What happened then? How did that come about? Yeah, so for many years, my grandmother, Luth, that maybe he's somewhere in Siberia, maybe he'll come back

from some prison somewhere in Soviet Union, but it never happened. My grandmother never remarried her whole life. She was waiting for him. I think it started in Poland and the Berlin Wall fell down and finally solidarity and so on. All these things happening and 1990 the communist regime fell apart and then the archives are being opened and they found the documents from the Pilecki case from 1947. It wasn't complete so some of the documents were missing but for example

there was the report, there was the death certificate so finally we got to know that yes he was killed in 1948 but we didn't know about it, yes? As a family they never told us. And I remember Andrzej, so my uncle, telling me that he was really nervous to show this to his mother, yes? Because the whole life she was like waiting for him and here is a paper saying he's long dead.

And how did they react to that, Maria and Zofia, and how did their life change after that? I think it was some kind of closure for Maria. At least she could tell herself that she shouldn't be waiting anymore. So it's more like moving on in a way and just remembering the good things about him and their life. Zofia couldn't tell anyone about her father for so long time, so when she finally could, then she was very energetic. And I think the new beginning of fighting for this memory of her father, because we knew what he did, but it was really maybe, I don't know, five historians knew it and then the family.

So it was like her life mission to bring him back to the common memory. So she was central in getting his story better known, known at all. I think so. Also, obviously her brother, but Zofia, yes, was very focused on it and most of her activities were just pointed to bring back this memory and tell people about it. And so what happened to your great grandfather's remains? Were they ever found? So we don't know what happened to them. They were never found. It was, I think, three times they said, yeah, we're pretty sure it's him, but they never really found them. Some people like calling my grandma, for example, congratulating her that, yeah, finally he's been found. And

she's like, where, when, how? And then it seems that only the press wrote some article about it that probably he's found and everyone understood, yeah, finally he's there. So they were digging up the few cemeteries to find him because the general practice was just burying them during the night on the outskirts of the cemetery. The people that they killed in those prisons. And they were DNA testing but never found him. There is one idea that maybe he was simply burnt in one of the big furnaces. And we don't know really.

You were talking about how your grandmother Zofia fought to get Vitold's story out there. When did it really start entering the public consciousness? I think it began in 2001 or 2002, but it was very small steps and around 2006 or 2007 it finally blew up, I would say. So suddenly Vitold was here and there and the idea of putting some monument. Nowadays there is a Pilecki Institute, for example, in Warsaw, many books about him and so on. So he's quite well known in Poland.

In the rest of the world maybe not that much, but... So it's very recent, it took a long time. Is there a feeling now that VTOL is being used by the current powers in Poland for their own ends? So let's, you know, it's like political situation is a little bit complicated, but let's call those guys the right side, right wingers. So they're very nationalistic and they... I have to simplify it because it's more complicated, but generally they try to show Witold Pilecki as an example of the ordinary Pole during the war. Putting him on the monument and saying, yeah, look, this is how every Pole was behaving, yeah, which we do not really have any control over it, so no one really asked the family when

you put someone like that who is dead for 70 years and you try to put him in a political context, I do not like it. That's my problem. For many people who are not dead into history, they might think of him like a crazy right-winger nowadays because he was very patriotic to the level which you might call a bit nationalistic, but this is not this nationalism which says kill other nations and so on, yeah, it's just my nation is very important for me and I'm trying to do everything I can do to do it to grow, to be good and so on. In times of short films and TikToks it's all getting

of short films and TikToks, it's all getting mixed together and really the story of Witold Pilecki is quite a clear one, I would say. So sometimes they try to mud the water a little bit around him. Also, these right-wingers, they helped to bring back this memory. So let's call them the left-wing. They didn't care at all. So from family point of view, we owe them a little bit because they helped us to show this person.

But then when they talk about history, it's totally fine. I do not care who says it, as long as he says truth, it's fine. Particularly coming out of a period where Poland hadn't been its own country. That's very different to be a nationalist under those conditions than, as you say, some of the sort of more poisonous nationalism. Exactly. And I don't think Vito's nationalism patriotic thing was poisonous.

It was very concerned on the country, on the nation. So what do you think Vito would make of all this? The fact that there are statues to him everywhere and an institute and that he's being used by various different people for their own ends. I do not think he would like it. I also think he was not very political. He was more into putting people together for them to join against someone or for something. He also wrote many times that he didn't care about all this, you know, like a medal of honor or some other official things. He just was trying to do something for the common good.

I like especially one monument of him in Warsaw, because it's like a cube showing him going out of the cube. And then on the one of the walls walls you can see silhouettes of people who walk behind him or just next to him. And for me it symbolizes that he never did everything by himself. There were many people cooperating to do something. And I think it's true, he was connecting people doing something together. And so for you personally, Christoph, what is Vitold's legacy?

I think we all, wherever we come from, we can learn from his life, what he did. But his legacy as a general thing, I think it's that if you really want something to happen, you have to work hard to do it. And it's in most cases, it's possible. The second thing, this legacy, would be being truthful. It was very important for Vito for the truth to be told. And that's also the story of his life after his death. The truth is triumphant, yeah, because after so many years,

finally he's there, as a kind of a hero. And I think the love is the first big thing. He had to choose between love to his country, to his nation and his family. But I am really sure he loved very much his family, his wife and his children. You can see it in their eyes when you talk to them about him. They're like, yes, he was our hero from the beginning. Do you have anything physically in common with him? Not much. But yeah, there are some people who tell me that I look alike.

And one of these older ladies, she approached me on one of these history meetings and he said, yeah, you look exactly like him, exactly. And I say, yes, thank you very much. It's really nice to hear, but you know, I've seen myself in the mirror and I look a little bit different. So bigger nose, bigger mouth. And she's like, yes, yes, you're right. But you're receding her line is exactly the same.

So yeah, thank you for that. But in general, no, I'm Mr. Nobody on the streets. I guess partly also what you were talking about before is that he came across as a very ordinary, normal guy. And, you know, that's what he looked like. And on some levels for his normal guy, and that's what he looked like. On some levels for his family, I guess that's what he was. Well thank you for joining us today and sharing that and letting us all know a little bit

more about him, because he obviously was an extraordinary man and did some amazing things. My pleasure. Thank you for having me once again and my privilege to talk to you. Well, that was really interesting talking to Christoph and having that family connection. Christoph is talking about his great-grandfather. I don't even know who my great-grandfathers were, but he has no way of avoiding that. So it was really interesting to talk to Christoph about that legacy and how he copes with that and how he is very uneasy about how, now that Witold is better known and is a big hero in

Poland, he is being used by other people for their own ends. And those stories are now out of the family's control. I know in later life that Vitold was heavily traumatized by what had happened to him, but he had managed quite a long time to do that classic spy thing of dividing his life into two parts, still being a family man but secretly doing his other stuff, even though he must have known that he was putting his own family in danger. Thank you for listening and do join us for our next episode of The Spy Who. Wondery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and add free on Apple

Podcasts or the Wandery app. From Wandery, this is the final episode in our series, The Spy Who Infiltrated Auschwitz. This episode of The Spy Who is hosted by me, Charlie Higson. Our show is produced by Vespucci for Wandery, with story consultancy by Yellow Ant. The producers of this episode are Ashley Clevery and Philippa Gearing. Our senior producer is Rachel Byrne. Our sound designer is Ivor Manley. Music supervisor is Scott

Velasquez for Frisson Sink. Executive producers for Vespucci are Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turcan. The executive producer for Yellow Ant is Tristan Donovan. Our senior producer for Wondery is Theodora Leloudis and our senior managing producer for Wondery is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery is Theodora Leloudis, and our senior managing producer for Wondery is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne, Morgan Jones and Marshall Louis.