That was on a relatively good day at the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942, in the words of the only person ever known to have volunteered to be a prisoner there. His name was Witold Pilecki. His story is one of history’s most amazing accounts of boundless courage amid bottomless inhumanity.
Powerful emotions gripped me when I first learned of Pilecki. I felt rage toward the despicable regimes that put this honorable man through hell. I welled up with admiration for how he dealt with it all. Here you have a story that depicts both the worst and the best in men.
To label Pilecki a “hero” seems hopelessly inadequate.
Resistance
Olonets is a small town northeast of Saint Petersburg, Russia, seven hundred miles from present-day Poland. It’s where Witold Pilecki was born in 1901, but his family was not there by choice. Four decades earlier, when many Poles lived under Russian occupation, the czarist government in Moscow forcibly resettled the Pileckis in Olonets for their part in an uprising.
At the conclusion of World War I, Poland was reconstituted as an independent nation for the first time since 1795, but it immediately became embroiled in war with Lenin’s Russia. Pilecki joined the fight against the Bolsheviks when he was seventeen, first on the front and then from behind enemy lines. For two years he fought gallantly and was twice awarded the prestigious Cross of Valor.
In the eighteen years between the end of the Polish-Russian war in 1921 and the beginning of World War II, Pilecki settled down, married, and fathered two children with his wife, Maria. He rebuilt and farmed his family’s estate, became an amateur painter, and volunteered for community and Christian charities—work that earned him the Silver Cross of Merit. And, after extensive officer training, he earned the rank of second lieutenant in the Polish army reserves. He probably thought his combat days were over.
Words of Wisdom from Witold Pilecki
“A man fighting for his life can do more than he ever imagined he could.”
But in August 1939 Hitler and Stalin secretly agreed to divide Poland between them. On September 1 the Nazis attacked the country from the west, and two weeks later the Soviets invaded from the east. The world was at war again—and so was Pilecki.
Pilecki and Jan Włodarkiewicz cofounded the Secret Polish Army (Tajna Armia Polska). This resistance force and other elements of a growing underground movement carried out numerous raids against both Nazi and Soviet forces. In September 1940 Pilecki proposed a daring plan that in hindsight appears nearly unimaginable: he would arrange to be arrested in the hope that the Nazis, instead of executing him, would send him to Auschwitz, where he could gather information and form a resistance group from the inside.
If he could survive arrest, Pilecki figured, Auschwitz would probably be where the Germans incarcerated him. It was nearby (in southern Poland), and many Polish resistance fighters were imprisoned there. It wasn’t yet the death camp for Jews that it would soon become, but there were murmurings of executions and brutality that the Polish resistance wanted to investigate so they could inform the world.
On September 19, Pilecki kissed his wife and two young children good-bye. Equipped with forged identity papers and a new name, he walked into a Nazi roundup of some two thousand civilians. Two days and a few beatings later, he was Auschwitz inmate number 4859.
A Dangerous Game
Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, had men like Pilecki in mind when he wrote in his powerful book Man’s Search for Meaning:
The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.
Fired by a determination that almost defies description, Pilecki made the most of every opportunity during his thirty-month imprisonment at Auschwitz. Despite bouts of typhus and pneumonia, lice infestations, stomach ailments, backbreaking toil hauling rocks, extremes of heat and cold, relentless hunger, and cruelties at the hands of German guards, he formed an underground resistance group, the Union of Military Organization (Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, or ZOW). His initial reports of conditions within Auschwitz were smuggled out and reached Britain in November 1940, just two months after his detention began. Using a radio transmitter that he and his fellow ZOW conspirators built, in 1942 he broadcast information that convinced the Allies the Nazis were engaged in genocide on an unprecedented scale. What became known as “Witold’s Report” was the first comprehensive eyewitness account of the Holocaust.
“The game which I was now playing in Auschwitz was dangerous,” Pilecki later wrote. “This sentence does not really convey the reality; in fact, I had gone far beyond what people in the real world would consider dangerous.” Even that is an understatement. He was surrounded by a camp staff of seven thousand Nazi SS troops, each of whom possessed life-and-death power over every inmate. It was a hell on earth—one where no moral rules applied.
More than two million people died at Auschwitz. As many as eight thousand per day were gassed with the deadly chemical Zyklon-B, while others died of starvation or disease, from forced labor, or through hideous “medical” experimentation. Smoke from the ovens that burned the corpses could be seen and smelled for miles. Pilecki saw it, wrote about it, broadcast news of it, and even prepared for a general uprising of inmates against it—all under the noses of his captors.
By spring 1943, the Germans knew that an extensive resistance network was at work in Auschwitz. Many ZOW members had been identified and executed, but Pilecki’s identity as the ringleader hadn’t yet been discovered. Then, on the night of Easter Sunday 1943, Pilecki accomplished what only 143 other people in the history of Auschwitz ever could. He escaped, bringing with him incriminating documents that he and two fellow inmates had stolen from the Germans.
Going Undercover Again
If this were the end of the story, Witold Pilecki would already be a major figure in the history of World War II. Incredibly, there’s more to tell—and it’s every bit as stunning as what you’ve read so far.
Avoiding detection, Pilecki made his way from Auschwitz to Warsaw, a journey of some two hundred miles. There he reestablished connections with the underground in time to assume a commanding role in the Warsaw Uprising, the largest single military offensive undertaken by any European resistance movement in World War II.
For sixty-three days fighting raged between the Polish resistance and Nazi forces. No one came to the rescue of the brave Poles—not even the Soviets, who by then had broken ties with Hitler’s Germany. The Soviet army had been advancing from the east but halted just short of Warsaw and watched the slaughter. The city was demolished, the rebellion was put down, and Pilecki found himself in a German POW camp for the remaining months of the war. If the Nazis had realized who he was, summary execution surely would have followed.
Germany’s surrender in May 1945 resulted in the immediate liberation of its prisoners. For Pilecki in particular, it meant a brief respite from conflict and confinement. Stationed in Italy as part of the Second Polish Corps, he wrote a personal account of his time at Auschwitz.
But as the summer turned into fall, it was becoming apparent that the Soviets were not planning to leave Poland. In October, Pilecki accepted yet another undercover assignment—to go back to Poland and gather evidence of growing Soviet atrocities. His activities led the pro-Soviet Polish puppet regime to mark him as an enemy of the state.
In May 1947, two years to the day after Nazi Germany capitulated, Witold Pilecki’s cover was blown. He was arrested and tortured for months before a sham public trial in May 1948, where he was found guilty of espionag
e and given a death sentence.
His last words before his execution on May 25 were “Long live free Poland!” He was forty-seven.
“Beacon of Hope”
Are you wondering why you’ve never heard of this man before?
For decades the leaders of the postwar, Soviet-installed Polish regime buried information about Pilecki. They couldn’t recount his anti-Nazi activities without telling of his anticommunist work as well. The communist government monitored Pilecki’s family for decades, forbidding anyone from mentioning his name in public.
But the fall of the Iron Curtain brought the release of previously classified or suppressed documents, including Pilecki’s complete reports. His superhuman exploits are finally becoming known around the world. American film producer David Aaron Gray began working on a movie about Pilecki’s life.
Jarek Garlinski, introducing his English translation of Pilecki’s 1945 report (published as The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery), summarizes the extraordinary character of Witold Pilecki:
Endowed with great physical resilience and courage, he showed remarkable presence of mind and common sense in quite appalling circumstances, and a complete absence of self-pity. While most inmates of Auschwitz not slated for immediate death were barely able to survive, he had enough reserves of strength and determination left to help others and to build up an underground resistance organization within the camp. Not only that, he managed to keep a clear head at all times and recognize what he needed to do in order to stay alive.
Pilecki’s reports from the death camp, Garlinski writes, did more than advance Allied intelligence against the Nazis. They also represented a “beacon of hope”—demonstrating that “even in the midst of so much cruelty and degradation there were those who held to the basic virtues of honesty, compassion, and courage.”
In March 2016 I visited Witold Pilecki’s eighty-five-year-old son, Andrzej, in his flat in Warsaw. “What makes you happy these days?” I asked. His response: “My father’s memory, which finally the world is coming to know.”
Lessons from Witold Pilecki
Have the courage to resist oppression: Courage is indispensable to the preservation of liberty. The world is full of people who would be happy to take your liberty—and full of timid people who would let that happen. Witold Pilecki was not timid. He volunteered to go to Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi concentration camp.
Hold fast to your virtues: Pilecki’s story underscores the importance of what one commentator calls “the basic virtues of honesty, compassion, and courage.” Amid the horrors of Auschwitz, Pilecki retained “the strength to understand everything that was going on and take it calmly in [his] stride.”
27
Anne Frank
Gratitude in Adversity
German-born Anne Frank is surely the most unusual best-selling teenage author of the twentieth century. She penned but one volume, a diary, while hiding from the Nazis during the German occupation of the Netherlands.
“How wonderful it is,” she wrote in that tiny hideaway, “that no one has to wait, but can start right now to gradually change the world.”
Imagine it. Living each day for two years crammed in a secret annex behind a bookcase, knowing that without notice you might be found and hauled off to near-certain death at a concentration camp. Barely a teenager, she managed to write those words and many other remarkable passages before she and her family were discovered in August 1944. They were sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where Anne died in March 1945, three months before her sixteenth birthday and only a month before the Allies liberated the camps.
How is it possible for a youngster to see so much light in a dark world, to find within herself so much hope and optimism amid horror? What insight! What power! That’s been the magic of Anne Frank for the past seven decades.
The Diary
When Anne was four, her parents fled Germany. That was in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power. The Franks, who were Jewish, sought refuge in Amsterdam but were trapped there when Hitler occupied the Netherlands in May 1940. Two years later, with persecution of Jews escalating, they went into hiding.
Eight days into her diary, on June 20, 1942, Anne wrote this reflective note about her undertaking: “Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.”
Little did she know that she would be immortalized once her writings were found and published after the war as The Diary of a Young Girl. That’s not only because of her remarkable eloquence at such a young age but also because of her unconquerably positive attitude. It was one of optimism, hope, service to others, and, perhaps most important of all, gratitude for the good she saw in a war-torn world.
This entry from April 5, 1944, just four months before she penned the last thing she would ever write, will touch almost anybody’s heart: “I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met.”
Her diary is full of such uplifting sentiments. One would expect to find endless tales about the privations and claustrophobia of confinement, fearing discovery at any moment. Not from this girl. Yes, there are dark moments and candid admissions of disappointment and doubt, but just when you think she’s down and out, she offers observations like “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
Words of Wisdom from Anne Frank
“How wonderful it is that no one has to wait, but can start right now to gradually change the world.”
The Power of Gratitude
In the 2007 book Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier, Dr. Robert A. Emmons reveals groundbreaking research into the emotion we call gratitude. As Emmons defines the term, gratitude is the acknowledgment of goodness in one’s life and the recognition that the source of this goodness lies at least partially outside oneself. I think this was the secret to Anne Frank’s character.
Years of study by Emmons and his associates show that “grateful people experience higher levels of positive emotions such as joy, enthusiasm, love, happiness, and optimism, and that the practice of gratitude as a discipline protects a person from the destructive impulses of envy, resentment, greed, and bitterness.”
A grateful attitude enriches life. Emmons believes it elevates, energizes, inspires, and transforms. The science supports him: research shows that gratitude is indispensable to happiness (the more of it you can muster, the happier you’ll be) and that happiness adds as many as nine years to life expectancy.
Gratitude is much more than a warm and fuzzy sentiment. And it does not come automatically, unthinkingly. Some people feel and express it all too rarely. And as grateful a person as you may think you are, chances are you can develop an even more grateful attitude. Doing so carries ample rewards that more than compensate for the task’s moral and intellectual challenges. If Anne Frank could do it with all that was going on around her closeted world for two years, you and I have few excuses for failing to muster gratitude as well.
The English writer and philosopher G. K. Chesterton once said, “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
Think about that, especially Chesterton’s use of the word wonder. It means “awe” or “amazement.” The least-thankful people tend to be those who are rarely awed or amazed.
A shortage of wonder is a source of considerable error and unhappiness in the world. What should astonish us all, some take for granted or even expect as an entitlement.
We enjoy an endless stream of labor-saving, life-enriching inventions. We’re surrounded by abundance in markets for everything from food to shoes to books. We travel in hours distances that required weeks or months of discomfort for our recent ancestors.
In America, life expectancy at age six
ty is up by about eight years since 1900, while life expectancy at birth has increased by an incredible thirty years. The top three causes of death in 1900 were pneumonia, tuberculosis, and gastrointestinal infections. Today we live healthier lives and live long enough to die mainly from illnesses (such as heart disease and cancer) that are degenerative, aging-related problems.
Technology, communications, and transportation have all progressed so much in the past century that hardly a library in the world could document the stunning accomplishments. I still marvel every day that I can call a friend in China from my car or find the nearest coffee shop by using an app on my phone. I’m in awe every time I take a coast-to-coast flight, while the guy next to me complains that the flight attendant doesn’t have any ketchup for his omelet.
None of these things that should inspire wonderment were inevitable, automatic, or guaranteed. Some see it all and are amazed and grateful. Others see it and are jaded and unappreciative.
Which are you?
A Message of Hope
Anne Frank’s message will be remembered for many decades to come—forever, I hope. It reminds us that, no matter the circumstances, we can brighten our lives and those of others. We don’t have to sink into despair. We can find good in the smallest of things even as we confront the biggest of evils. Our attitude, the old saying goes, determines our altitude. If you want to make a better world, start by making a better self; it’s the one thing you have considerable control over in almost any situation.
Anne Frank didn’t live long enough to see or possess very much. But because she found within herself an undying gratitude for what she had—and an awesome ability to communicate it—we can be thankful that she inspires millions to this day. No matter how old you are, you can learn some critical life lessons from this brave teenage heroine.
Real Heroes Page 17