Witold Pilecki (1901–1948)
Autor de The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery
Obras de Witold Pilecki
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1901-05-13
- Fecha de fallecimiento
- 1948-05-25
- Lugar de sepultura
- Cimetière de Powązki, Varovie, Pologne (Panthéon de la Pologne combattante, Tombe symbolique)
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- Poland
- País (para mapa)
- Pologne
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Olonec, Karelia, Russia
- Lugar de fallecimiento
- Warsaw, Poland
- Causa de fallecimiento
- Exécuted on may, 25 1948 by polish communist regime in Mokotow prison with a bullet in the back of the neck
- Lugares de residencia
- Auschwitz, Poland
- Educación
- Université de Vilnius
- Ocupaciones
- soldier
resistance fighter - Relaciones
- Ostrowska, Maria (Epouse, 19 31)
- Organizaciones
- Résistance clandestine polonaise (Anti-nazi puis anticommmuniste,19 39 | 19 48)
Ferme familiale, Lida (alors en Pologne, aujourd'hui en Biélorussie / Exploitant) - Premios y honores
- Order of the White Eagle (2006)
Order of Polonia Restituta (1995) - Biografía breve
- Witold Pilecki was born in Karelia, Russia, where his Polish family had been forcibly resettled by Tsarist Russian authorities after the suppression of the January Uprising of 1863-1864. In 1910, the family moved to Wilno (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) where Pilecki joined the secret ZHP Scouts organization. In 1918, during World War I, he joined Polish self-defense units in the Wilno area. He later joined the regular Polish Army and fought in numerous battles, including the liberation of Wilno. During World War II, as a soldier of the Second Polish Republic, he was a founder of the Secret Polish Army Polish resistance group, and a member of the Home Army. In 1940, Pilecki smuggled himself into the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz under a false name and began recruiting members for an underground resistance group that he organized into a coherent movement. He sent information about what was going on inside the camp and confirmed that the Nazis were working to exterminate the Jews, using a courier system that the Polish Resistance operated throughout occupied Europe to channel the reports to the Allies. In 1943, after having spent 2½ years at Auschwitz, Pilecki realized that the Allies did not plan to liberate the camp before the end of the war. He escaped with two other prisoners that led to a Gestapo manhunt for them. In 1944, Pilecki was captured while fighting in the Warsaw Uprising and spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp. He then joined the Free Polish troops in Italy in July 1945 and agreed to return to Poland and gather intelligence on the country's takeover by the Soviets. Pilecki was caught by the Polish Communist regime, tortured, and executed at Mokotow Prison in Warsaw in 1948. The details of his heroism did not emerge until 40 years later, after the collapse of Communism in 1989. Pilecki was posthumously awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta and the Order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish decoration.
Miembros
Reseñas
Amazing story of perseverance and survival, but for the history buff, a lot of background to the Geneses of the death camp, for the ethnic cleansing of Poles. But what amazed me was how many Poles were released after being bought out by family or signing up to change their ethnicity to German. This option not open to Jews, of course, but clinging to their national identity, so many perished under the most extreme cruelty. Also, more than a few SS men were also pull in the hole for love affairs with Jewish women, served their term and got back on duty. Human nature, appalling and heroic altogether.… (más)
Il 19 settembre 1940 durante un rastrellamento nazista a Varsavia, Witold Pilecki prende la direzione opposta a tutti gli altri e si fa arrestare volontariamente per essere mandato ad Auschwitz. Il nome non è ancora sinonimo di inferno, come sarebbe diventato, tuttavia chiunque avrebbe considerato quel gesto folle. (fonte: Google Books)
Premios
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Estadísticas
- Obras
- 1
- Miembros
- 134
- Popularidad
- #151,727
- Valoración
- 4.0
- Reseñas
- 5
- ISBNs
- 17
- Idiomas
- 7
If you're a reader of history, WWII, Poland, the Holocaust, or spy novels go & buy this book or buy it for someone you know who is into these subjects. You won't regret it.
Pilecki's story is astonishing. He was a military man and member of the Polish resistance who volunteered to be taken in a round-up to the new Nazi concentration camp: Auschwitz. The camp was established in May 1940. On the 19th of September 1940 at 6 am, Pilecki stepped into what would be the second group of inmates taken from Warsaw to the camp. If you're jaded, you might think, "Oh, well, they didn't really know what to expect, so maybe it was just like any volunteer assignment during wartime." Well, you could think that, but then consider the fact that Pilecki stayed in the camp for almost three years (he estimated 947 days). THREE YEARS he voluntarily stayed in Auschwitz to continue his mission which was to gather intelligence and set up a network of resistance within the camp. "Beyond Bravery," indeed.
I'm sure no one would have condemned him had he chosen to escape sooner, but Pilecki was a man who took his duty to his country seriously. He was also motivated by his Catholic faith and so saw both the Nazis and the Communists as threats not only to his country, but to his spiritual life as well.
Pilecki's account is a bare bones military report, but it reads beautifully, if I may use such a descriptor for this horrific subject. His story has such a big impact perhaps precisely because he doesn't go into great detail. Like a good Cather or Hemingway novel, we're left to fill in our own details which makes "the story" that much more powerful. Much credit, of course, goes to the translator, Jarek Garlinski. There is also the fact that in 2012 we might not need much detail to round things out for ourselves after having seen movies and read other books about Nazi concentration camps.
But even if you've read many accounts of the concentration camps, I doubt you've ever read anything like this. Because Pilecki is reporting, because he's there with a mission, he sees things and talks about seemingly familiar behavior and situations in a way that makes them seem new--you see how shocking the behavior of the guards is and how tactics change as the mission of the camp itself changes. You see the development and evolution of Auschwitz as it unfolds. This is a strictly chronological report so you're taken from the early days of the camp when extreme violence and cruelty were the norm to the more "mature" camp of the final solution's extreme dehumanizing systematization. Along the way is a lot of fascinating information about how the inmates ran the camp.
As a kid I would have liked to have known the story of Witold Pilecki and I hope someone writes a book for kids based on his experience (this book is intended, of course, for mature audiences). My Dad was Polish and I grew up in a predominantly Polish neighborhood in Cicero, IL which butts up to the west side of Chicago. On the other hand, my Mom is from Germany. (My parents met in Germany in the late 1950s when my dad was stationed there.) It wasn't until I was in high school and became a student of history that I realized why people sometimes said my parents were an interesting combination.
The version of history I learned in school was that Nazi Germany rolled over Poland and there was no resistance. And the version of concentration camps that I learned is that they were set up to eradicate Jews and that the world didn't know about them prior to 1945. Pilecki's story offers a new narrative to counter these old simplified stories as well as bringing to light the horrors that Poles faced after the war (stories that were not necessarily intentionally "wrong," but that didn't have a multitude of contributing voices, the benefit of decades of research, or new information coming out of the former Soviet Union).
One of the reasons we in the West haven't heard of Pilecki's bravery is what happened to him after Word War II ended:
After Pilecki's escape from Auschwitz he continued to work in the Polish resistance. At war's end he worked against the communist regime in Poland. He was captured and tortured by the Polish secret police and tried by a military court that found him guilty of "spying and preparing armed attacks on members of the Polish secret police," charges he denied. Pilecki was executed by the Polish communist government on May 25, 1948.
Pilecki was fully exonerated in the 1990s and is now considered a hero in modern Poland. The publication of The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery is the first time his story is being shared with the English speaking world and I hope it finds a wide audience.
As Norman Davies writes in the introduction to The Auschwitz Volunteer, "If ever there was an Allied hero who deserved to be remembered and celebrated, this was a person with few peers" (xiii).
Source: review copy (I follow a couple Polish heritage/cultural sites and this summer saw the book advertised on one of them and immediately requested a copy from the publisher, which they graciously sent me and for which I thank them.)… (más)