Free Republic

On Thursday, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs will address world leaders and Holocaust survivors gathered to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He is one of the country's most high-profile inmates of the infamous concentration camp. Bartoszewski was sent to Auschwitz after being rounded up as an 18-year-old high-school student in 1940. The eight months of almost daily beatings with fists and clubs failed to break his spirit, though, and within months of his release he helped co-found Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, a group funded by the government in exile that helped save...

Pilecki's early life Witold Pilecki was born May 13, 1901, in Olonets (in Polish, Oloniec) on the shores of Lake Ladoga in Karelia, Russia, where his family had been forcibly resettled by Tsarist Russian authorities after the suppression of Poland's January Uprising of 1863-1864. His grandfather, Józef Pilecki, had spent seven years in exile in Siberia for his part in the Uprising. In 1910 Pilecki moved with his family to Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania), where he completed Commercial School and joined the secret ZHP scouts organization. In 1916 he moved to Orel, Russia, where he founded a local ZHP group....