M.R.D. Foot
The Nazi holocaust produced the 20th century’s darkest moments; it also produced its most shining examples of moral and physical courage. Witold Pilecki was a Polish army officer who determined to break into the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz to set up a resistance movement there.
Pilecki, though still only a junior officer in his middle forties, was someone of enormous force of character, even in a society that teemed with people of strong character and intense individuality. He belonged to a body called the Tajna Armia Polska, the Secret Polish Army; a body that was merged eventually in the AK, the Home Army. It would be misleading to say he played a prominent part in the TAP, because as every Pole knew it was indispensable not to be prominent, for anyone working clandestinely against an occupier; but he was extremely active. Several much more senior people knew and trusted him, and he was aware of a great deal that was going on.
Reports of the camp under construction at Oswiecim – as the Poles called Auschwitz – reached and impressed him, and he conceived a daring plan to do something about it. The plan was so daring that for several weeks his colonel hesitated to approve. It was simply – most daring plans are simple – to let himself get arrested, and sent to Auschwitz as a prisoner. Having got there, he was to send out reports of what was really happening inside the camp, to see whether he could organize resistance, and then, if he could, to escape.
On top of the military difficulties of these tasks, the personal ones were severe. He had married a dozen years earlier, and had a daughter; but Poland’s crisis was such that merely personal troubles just had to be brushed aside. Mobilization overrode the marriage tie; his heart could and did stay with his wife and child, but his body had to go elsewhere.
A little time had to be spent on arranging the essential details about communication; a very few addresses, reckoned perfectly safe, which he had to memorize, and a safe, simple password system by which a messenger could establish good faith, were all that were needed. The TAP was a brisk and efficient body, though its leaders were already on the run from the Gestapo. It could clear up promptly business of this sort, over which café-conversationalist resisters in Bucarest or Paris could dally for months, even years.
And by a stroke of luck, Pilecki secured a false identity which, he reckoned, ought to earn him a sentence to Auschwitz, his first objective: the identity of Tomasz Serafiński, a reserve officer who had gone underground instead of reporting to the Germans as ordered. Pilecki did not know – he did not need to know – where Serafiński had gone. He found out instead enough about Serafiński’s past to survive cross-questioning in his new character; and he knew that the German secret police, as methodical as they were cruel, had secured a list of all the peacetime officers in the Polish army, active and reserve. To be on this list, and (like the other 19,600) not to have surrendered oneself, would – he reckoned – be crime enough to merit consignment to Auschwitz.
His reckoning proved correct.
It was not difficult to get arrested. He just failed to run away down the nearest side street, one early morning in September 1940 when the Germans made a routine rush-hour check on people walking into central Warsaw to work. He shortly found himself, with a thousand companions, lying face down on the damp sawdust floor of a nearby riding school. Their hands were stretched out flat in front of them, palms down. Machine guns covered them from the galleries. SS-men walked among them, whipping those who fidgeted. Pilecki did not fidget.
Two days later, he was received (as Serafiński) in Auschwitz, and became prisoner number 4,859. In his own words, as he and his companions were marched from the railway station into the camp:
On the way one of us was ordered to run to a post a little off the road and immediately after him went a round from a machine-gun. He was killed. Ten of his casual comrades were pulled out of the ranks and shot on the march with pistols on the ground of “collective responsibility” for the “escape”, arranged by the SS-men themselves. The eleven were dragged along by straps tied to one leg. The dogs were teased with the bloody corpses and set onto them. All this to the accompaniment of laughter and jokes.
They reached the camp as glum, they thought, as could be; marched in under the slogan Arbeit macht frei (work sets you free); and were then made glummer still by being made to strip, and to have all their hair, body hair as well as head hair, shaved off, and to put on the prison uniform of striped canvas.
Pilecki was lucky enough to get an indoor job, as one of the cleaning staff for his hut; but lost it before long, as the German criminal in charge of the but would only employ on his staff those who, like himself, habitually clubbed their fellow-prisoners before speaking to them. Not only did he lose his soft job, as well as many other illusions, promptly, he soon almost lost his health, which in such a camp was equivalent to losing one’s life.
On 28 October 1940, a man ran away from an outside working-party, and was found to be missing at the noon roll-call. All the prisoners were kept standing at attention on the parade-ground from noon till nine in the evening; in an icy north-east wind that bore heavy rain and sleet, turn and turn about. Anyone who moved was liable to be shot – 200 died of exposure. Pilecki was among several hundred more who collapsed, but was nursed back to a semblance of health in the camp hospital, and rapidly returned to work.
The work consisted of building more huts to hold the increased numbers of prisoners who were expected, to store the belongings they brought with them, and in the end to dispose of them and their bodies.
All Nazi concentration camps were run by the SS. Most existed for two reasons: as prisons to sequester those the SS wanted out of the way, and as factories to provide the SS with profits. For this peculiar organization, originally Hitler’s small personal bodyguard, grew to be a state-within-a-state of an unusually intricate kind; financing itself in part from the products of its slave labour; and with its own private army, the Waffen-SS. Through this army’s ranks a million men passed; it provided the hard core of Nazi Germany’s armed forces, nearly forty divisions strong, and included many crack units. Some of its weapons and equipment were, for economy’s sake, turned out by the camps that were under SS control.
At and near Auschwitz there were a few arms factories; but the Auschwitz-Birkenau group of camps existed for a third reason also, more secret and more sinister. Here among other places, here above all, the SS proposed to get on with the Endlösung, the final solution of the Jewish problem: the killing of all the Jews they could catch. As Himmler put it to Rudolf Hess, the founder-commandant of Auschwitz, in the late summer of 1941, “The Jews are the sworn enemies of the German people and must be eradicated. Every Jew that we can lay our hands on is to be destroyed now during the war, without exception.”
The method chosen was by cyanide gas poisoning. At Auschwitz and Birkenau, as at other extermination camps such as Treblinka, Maidanek, Sobibór, windowless concrete huts were built, with nozzles in their ceilings, into which Jews – or any other prisoners of whom the SS wanted to dispose – were herded, naked, in large crowds; believing they were to have a shower. They were showered with cyanide gas, their bodies were then hauled and shovelled across to the building next door, also prisoner-built, where they were cremated. On the way from gas chamber to crematorium, the bodies were checked for gold teeth or for rings, which were removed (it was simplest to remove ringed fingers with a garden chopper), to keep the SS profits up.
It took time, again, for a scheme of this size and this elaboration to get moving. Auschwitz was founded in 1940, the big killings did not start there till 1942; in January 1945 it was overrun by the Red Army. Twelve hundred prisoners were left in it at that moment, all too ill to move; in Birkenau there were about 5,800 more invalids, two-thirds of them women. Something approaching four million people had been killed in the complex meanwhile, during the 1,688 days of Auschwitz’s existence.
During Pilecki’s first three months in the camp, nearly 3,000 more prisoners joined it; they were only the beginners. By the summer of 1944 the Auschwitz-Birkenau group of camps had about 130,000 current inmates, sometimes 140,000; but the rate of turnover was very high. For instance, during that summer 437,000 Hungarian Jews were admitted to the camps, almost all of whom were killed when, or soon after, they arrived. In such cases people would be sent straight from the train to the gas chambers, pausing only on the way to undress – several large huts were filled, quite full, with their clothing. They were spared the body-shave Pilecki had gone through; their head hair was shorn after death, on their way to the crematoria, and made into mattresses, to keep the SS profits up.
Nearly a thousand prisoners were employed in the Sonderkommandos, the special squads that ran the actual process of extermination. All were Jews; they were housed, in the end, in the crematorium attics. Each squad worked a twelve-hour shift, turn and turn about with its alternate; about once a quarter, each squad was itself led into the gas chambers by its successor. “The members of the Sonderkommando, speaking many languages and dialects, could quieten down those being driven to their death, and this they did in the knowledge that they would gain nothing by behaving differently and that by kindly treatment they could at least mitigate the anguish of the victims’ last moments.” The death squads themselves knew only too well what awaited them.
All this apparatus of terror was under the guard of about 3,250 SS men. They never moved unarmed, seldom moved singly, and had all the usual adjuncts of a terror camp: tracker dogs, lighted electrified fences, torture chambers, above all, atmosphere. As Pilecki’s example showed us, from the moment they came under SS guard, prisoners were aware that their captors were entirely ruthless. The inmates were encouraged to believe that, as the crematorium squads mostly came to do, they should accept their fate as stoically as they could. They were there to die; they might as well die in a calm and orderly way.
Yet, diabolical as their captors were, they were not diabolically efficient. And in the early months of the camp, they even now and again let people out; it was still just possible to persuade even a member of the Gestapo that he might have made a mistake.
As early as November 1940, two months after his arrest, Pilecki was able to send his first report out of Auschwitz to Warsaw. It was memorized by one of his earliest recruits, a perfectly innocent and inoffensive citizen who had friends in Warsaw powerful enough to persuade the Germans that he had in fact been arrested in error. He was made to swear the customary oaths that he would reveal nothing about what went on inside the camp, but was a good enough Pole and a good enough Catholic to know that oaths sworn under duress have no value. When he made touch with Pilecki’s superiors, he talked.
There was not yet much to say. At this date the gas chambers, and the whole Birkenau camp, were no more than gleams in Himmler’s and Eichmann’s eyes. But at least Home Army headquarters now knew that Auschwitz was a concentration camp, and a cruel one (there were no mild ones); and that Witold Pilecki was at work inside it, seeing what he could do about resistance.
What could he do? First of all, continue to report: for which he seized every opportunity, however glancing, that appeared safe. Some of the SS garrison’s laundry, for example, was done for them in Auschwitz town. The SS did not want to demean themselves by carrying laundry baskets; they contented themselves with searching the baskets very thoroughly (such baskets forming a well known means of escape), and providing a vigilant armed guard for the prisoners who toted them. Over the months, their vigilance relaxed a trifle. The camp laundry squad had meanwhile had a chance to assess the characters of the few town laundry workers whom they saw, and, given luck and daring, could slip written notes to them. Any Pole could be relied on to be anti-German, so the notes got passed on to any address they bore.
Any such system bore risks of interception, at any and every stage; people who will not run risks cannot hope to win battles. In 1942–4 a considerable body of intelligence about what was going on inside the camps got passed out of Auschwitz and Birkenau, reached Warsaw safely, and was passed on thence to Stockholm, whence it reached London from March 1941. The London Poles passed the news on to MI6, which passed it to the foreign office; thence it went to Washington, Moscow, and any service departments that needed it. Some of it the Poles used straight away in their propaganda.
The trouble was that the news was, on the whole, too bad to be credible; and most people who heard it, did not take it in as true. Moscow was disinclined to believe anything that emanated from the London Poles, on principle. In Washington and London, everyone in authority, however bellicose towards Nazism, had been brought up to believe mass murder to be utterly beyond the pale of civilized behaviour, and imagined Germany still to be a civilized state. The sheer incredulity of distant senior men lay, unknown to Pilecki, as one obstacle across his path.
Much closer obstacles were only too obvious. The main starting task was to do anything he could to encourage his fellow prisoners not to kowtow, any more than they had to, to the terrorist regime under which they had to live. As most of his fellow prisoners were Poles, this task was not insuperably difficult. In carrying it through, he was able to gauge something of his companions’ characters, and to estimate which could be most useful for more advanced work.
He had had to abandon most of his preconceived ideas about what he would do, as soon as he discovered how hard conditions in the camp really were: a process of adapting idea to reality, painful enough in one’s teens, that can be excruciating in manhood, especially on the morrow of a great national disaster. He wanted to set up a secret grouping among the prisoners that would be ready to try to wrest power from the SS, the moment there was a nearby allied armed force to help. He did take in that there was no probability, no outside likelihood even, that the prisoners could seize power all by themselves: the SS had too many machine guns, and were too quick to use them. He hoped for a Russian or an Anglo-American parachute landing in force; or failing that, for a coup by Polish partisans.
There were in fact some Home Army partisan groups in the neighbourhood, now and again, though they were neither strong in numbers nor heavily armed. The Home Army’s weakness in arms, compared to similar groups in France or Greece or Yugoslavia, arose from two causes: Poland lay at the extreme limit of air range from Anglo-American territory, and the Russians forbade aircraft on supply sorties for the Home Army to land on soviet airfields. The few aircraft that could manage the round trip – even from Brindisi, when Brindisi became available late in 1943, it was a ten-hour flight – therefore had to take up most of their load with petrol, to get them there and back. France and Yugoslavia both got about 10,000 tons of warlike stores by air, through links with SOE and its American opposite number, OSS (the Office of Strategic Services); Poland only got 600 tons.
The People’s Army does not seem to have operated in the parts of Poland annexed to the Reich. The official soviet attitude to the camps was in any case, to a western eye, slightly odd. Theoretically – in Marxist-Stalinist theory, that is – no prisoners were ever taken from the Red Army; a Red Army man’s duty was to fight, never to surrender. The Germans and their satellites took over six million uniformed prisoners all the same (four-fifths of whom, by the by, succumbed in German hands: another huge item for the butchers’ bill). Every single survivor who was returned – usually forcibly, by the other allies – to the USSR after the war, automatically did a punishment spell in a Siberian labour camp. All camps, of whatever kind, were looked at askance by the Russians: except for their own. And the existence of their own was inadmissible.
But we must get back from these strategic and political generalities to the hard particular facts of Pilecki’s Auschwitz career. By Christmas 1940 he had already chosen his first five clandestine leaders; he added two more groups of five in the following spring. An attack of pneumonia, brought on by standing naked on parade for some hours in February while his hut and clothes were disinfested of lice, put him for a month into the camp hospital, where he organized a highly efficient cell. It was (as Peulevé later found in Buchenwald) a part of the camp well adapted for resistance and deception, and the Auschwitz hospital secured, by devious means, a wireless receiver: this freed prisoners in the know from dependence on Goebbels’ propaganda bulletins, which were all that the camp loudspeakers ever provided in the way of news. There were no newspapers within the camp.
All the attempts to organize resistance were not, of course, confined to Pilecki and his groups. Several senior Polish officers set about organizing intelligence networks, with varying degrees of success. Unhappily, some among them – some even of the senior officers who became involved in Pilecki’s own groupings – occasionally found they had to stand on their dignity, and insisted on receiving orders only from people senior to themselves. Such petty resentments, pathetically out of place in an SS camp, were ineradicable in the old Polish officer caste.
There were differences between Polish prisoners on more important matters than rank: they did not all see eye to eye in politics. Differences in political viewpoint grew more widespread, as the racial composition of the camp’s inmates changed. At first the prisoners were nearly all Poles, with a sprinkling of senior Germans, but over thirty nationalities were represented eventually; particularly Russians and Ukrainians, as well as hordes of Jews from several different states. Pilecki preferred dealing with Poles, as communication was so much more easy through a common language and common customs, but by no means imposed any sort of racial bar. In any case, while he was in the camp it remained very largely Polish in its prisoner population.
The communists among the prisoners at first lay low; after 22 June 1941 they hurled themselves into the resistance struggle, not with any outstanding effect. The German communists in Buchenwald and other camps often held dominant positions; the Polish communists, starting later in the struggle, were not as a rule as successful. One subsequently well-known politician, Jozef Cyrankiewicz, already – though ten years younger than Pilecki – an eminent socialist, took a leading part in the politico-military fusion that Pilecki’s tact and ability and common sense had created by the time Cyrankiewicz reached the camp in the autumn of 1942. He later drew apart from the right-wing elements whom Pilecki had persuaded to co-operate with the socialists; threw in his own lot with the left-wingers, and became prime minister of the new communist-dominated Poland after the war.
Such actual military organization as Pilecki was able to set up was necessarily slender and tentative; and conditions, as well as people, in the camp changed so fast that he found he had to set up different groups to cope with different contingencies. By night, with the prisoners locked in their huge huts, a different set of fighting men would be needed from the grouping that would apply during the day when prisoners were scattered at work, some inside the camp and some outside it.
A good deal of intricate, deadly secret planning was done on these necessarily conjectural lines, everyone in the early stages taking the utmost care to bring nobody else into the plot who was not wholly to be trusted. The one vital necessity was armament: which was at first glance unavailable.
Reflection showed some possibilities. A daring quartet of prisoners managed to fake up a key to the SS clothing store; and on 20 June 1942 dressed as two officers and two warrant officers, used another faked-up key to visit the arms store, stole a visiting senior officer’s car, and drove away in it, being smartly saluted by the sentry, who did not bother to look at their forged passes. One of them, called Jaster, bore a report of Pilecki’s which he delivered in Warsaw. Rumour swelled their numbers; the incident greatly cheered the prisoners who remained behind. They had a few rough weapons ready enough to hand: pick helves, spades, hammers, mauls, hand axes, a few two-handed felling axes: no use against an alert sub-machine-gunner, but not perfectly useless in a scrimmage, or at night. One or two attempts at mass break-outs were made with these hand weapons, all with ill result; though nine men out of one party of fifty did get clean away, and over 600 prisoners escaped altogether, one way and another. Over half of these 600 were soon recaptured, humiliated and killed.
Himmler himself visited the complex on 17–18 June 1942; watched a party of Jews reach Birkenau; saw most of them gassed; inspected the artificial-rubber works run in Auschwitz town by camp labour; asked to watch a woman being flogged; promoted Hess a rank; and went away.
Pilecki by now had four battalions of followers organized, about 500 of whom knew him by sight and name as a secret camp resistance leader: the secret was becoming much too open for comfort. He had a fairly settled job, so far as anything in Auschwitz was settled, in the tailor’s shop; and all his 500 friends were vigilantly on the watch for Gestapo informers, of whom there were many. He began to feel uneasy; before he left, he had one more macabre scheme to carry through.
The SS had a weakness for black pullovers, which they had knitted for them by women prisoners. There were quite a lot of women in Auschwitz, and hundreds of thousands died in Birkenau which was primarily a women’s camp: endless opportunities for intrigue, corruption and romance resulted. Hess himself had a prisoner mistress, though he had his own wife and small children living with him just outside the main gate; his conduct was widely enough known for him to have no hold over the misdemeanours of his own men.
Pilecki’s organization exploited the double SS weakness, for pretty girls, and for warm clothes, and with the help of their hospital friends, occasionally supplied the SS with pullovers or greatcoats bearing typhus-infected lice. A very few SS died as a result.
More direct action could be taken by men who were tired of life. At Sobibor camp, near Lublin, the Sonderkommando of about 300 in the innermost camp decided one day to break out. SS men visited the tailor’s shop one by one, to collect uniforms they had left there for pressing before they went on leave. A prisoner stood behind the shop door with a spade, and hit each SS man as hard as he could on the back of the head. When the tailors had collected fifteen corpses, and a pistol from each, the whole squad rushed the gate of the inner compound; got to the main gate; rushed that too, and were out in the open. Half of them were brought back by the surrounding peasantry, because they were Jews. A few got away. Himmler was so put out that he had the whole camp closed down.
This escape was not till 14 October 1943; by which time Pilecki was well away from Auschwitz.
His escape was straightforward. He decided to leave in the spring of 1943; for another body of four escapers from Auschwitz, who had got out on the previous 29 December, included a dentist called Kuczbara who knew too much about him, and had fallen back into Gestapo hands on 20 March. So it was dangerous for him to stay, and he was anxious also to impress in person on his superiors in Warsaw the readiness of the camp to rise, and the need for some positive partisan demonstration to give it the signal to do so.
He handed over military command to Major Bończa, and all the innumerable liaison details he carried in his head to Henryk Bartosiewicz – both were his friends – and was ready to leave. He secured – this was child’s play to someone by now so experienced underground – a forged pass to join the bakery squad: the bakery was outside the wire. By now he had left the tailor’s shop for the parcel office, and he faked illness on Easter Saturday, 24 April, to get out of that. Hospital friends discharged him in time to join his bakery squad on the next Monday/Tuesday night – like Peulevé, he was supposed to have typhus, but in this case he was not really ill at all. The prisoner boss of the bakery group was bribed with a piece of chicken; and a friend in the locksmith’s squad produced a key to the bakery door. Two companion bakers were to leave with him; all had plain clothes beneath their camp uniforms.
After several sweltering hours – Pilecki had never been in a bakery before – one of them cut the telephone wires, another unlocked the door, and at a moment when none of the SS was in sight they all went through it: and ran.
It was a fine night for escape, dark and pouring with rain, and they got to the bank of the Vistula – several miles away – unchallenged. They had everything they needed except food. “This had crossed their minds in the bakery, but at the last moment, in the heat of the dash for freedom, they had forgotten to grab a few loaves.” Pilecki moreover was racked by sciatica. Luck stayed with them: they found a dinghy on the river bank, padlocked, and by a miracle the bakery key opened the padlock.
They hid in a wood all day on Tuesday, and in another wood farther east all Wednesday. Next night, with a priest’s help, they crossed into the General Government, kept south of Cracow, and came on 2 May to a safe address at Bochnia, a town some twenty miles east of it. There Pilecki inquired for the nearest Home Army unit, and found it, by a singular freak, to be commanded by Tomasz Serafiński whose name he had been using in captivity.
Cracow District of the Home Army could not be got to take any interest in Auschwitz. Pilecki persevered, and went to main headquarters in Warsaw. There they had “a heap of files”, with all his reports in them and others; but could not be persuaded that the risks of an action against it were worth the running. If ever there were a countrywide rising, he was assured, Auschwitz would not be forgotten; and that was all.
He turned to other duties; fought through the Warsaw rising of August–September 1944; survived even that catastrophe; and spent the rest of the war, under a different false identity, in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Auschwitz had been an experience so shattering that he was looking for no more adventures; having lived through that and the Warsaw rising was, he felt, enough.
Or was it? When the Third Reich crumbled quite away, he moved southward in the crowds of what were pathetically named “displaced persons”, and reported to the Polish army in Italy. It was put to him that someone of his almost uncanny tenacity in adversity would be just the man to go back into Russian-occupied Poland on a mission for the Polish government-in-exile, in London.
He went; was arrested almost immediately he got there; and was executed in 1948 – no one outside the Polish and Russian secret police forces is quite sure when, or where. His wife and daughter, who still live in Poland, do not even know where he is buried.