A great man! Truly one of my heros.
Posted on 05/25/2023 11:55:21 AM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1948, Polish resistance hero Witold Pilecki was shot by Poland’s Communist government for a variety of subversions.
A former cavalry officer turned Home Army figure,* Pilecki authored one of the Great War’s most daring (and oddly obscure) covert escapades. In 1940, he volunteered to infiltrate Auschwitz — whose operations were then largely opaque to the Polish resistance — and allowed himself to be rounded up by the Gestapo.
Pilecki spent 31 months in the notorious concentration camp, organizing an inmate resistance network and shipping intelligence about the camp’s operations to the Polish resistance and (through them) the western Allies.
Though his pleas for a raid to liberate Auschwitz were in vain, Pilecki’s report catalogued the today-familiar horrors of the camp.
One bit, as it turned out, was a bit of foreshadowing....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
A great man, indeed. May he be forever blessed.
A great man, indeed. May he be forever blessed.
Truly a saint.
WWI was the “Great War”. By WWII, war wasn’t so great.
That is bizarre. Survived a Nazi concentration camp, only to be murdered by Marxists.
There was a lot of that, folks who fought Nazis, only to be killed by Communists.
At the time, Auschwitz was much smaller than it grew to be, and was mostly a place where they imprisoned political prisoners, and Russian POWs. They started expanding it to include Jews around 1942-3, when it replaced Treblinka, Sorbibor, Majdanek, etc., as the primary killing camp.
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I believe he was the man profiled in “Fighting Auschwitz,” a book I read in high school back in the seventies. We should have known something was up when so few movies were made about the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. An acquaintance of mine said, “They are bringing it here.”
I note that some of the movies made about life behind the Iron Curtain, are barely mentioned anymore, like “The Lives Of Others”. They seem to have gone down the rabbit hole in public consciousness.
After WW2 the Polish communists murdered tens of thousands of Polish patriots on behalf of the Kremlin. If you’re wondering why Poland is Ukraine’s greatest ally look no farther than this fact.
I’ve been to Auschwitz a number of times. The idea of infiltrating with the eventual hope of escaping terrifies me.
A large chunk of Ukraine was Poland and there’s still a sense of identification. Additionally, a number of Poles I’ve talked to openly talk about Ukraine as “Poland’s insurance policy” meaning that Russia and Belarus will focus there first rather than invade Poland.
There aren't nearly as many movies about the Iron Curtain, the Soviets and the Cold War as there are about the Third Reich and WWII. The life stories of defectors like Whittaker Chambers, Freda Utley and Walter Krivitsky would have been excellent material for Hollywood movies, as would anti-Communist classic novels like Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. But the Hollywood Reds, including the Hollywood Ten and the "heroes" of the "blacklist" saw to it that no such movies were ever made.
That’s true but the driving force is a shared history in that part of the world of misery and mass murder at the hands of the Kremlin. Russia’s running the same colonialist play book in Ukraine now and all of its neighbors can see all of its ugliness in their own histories.
And given the Warsaw Uprising, Stalin willing to let others do his dirty work. A vile man.
Another movie made around 1992, was “The Inner Circle”, it’s very difficult to find.
One of the most vile, was one of the men Pilecki worked with in Auschwitz, Józef Cyrankiewicz. Cyrankiewicz eventually joined the Communists, and condemned Pilecki. He remained in the Politburo for years after.
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