The Pilecki Report original documents, courtesy of www.theauschwitzvolunteer.com
New York’s Musem of Jewish Heritage hosts a special presentation of Witold Pilecki’s unique, historic testimony of the Auschwitz death camp. Translated into English by Jarek Garliński and published in the spring of 2012, the edition features an introduction by historian Norman Davies as well as the Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich
With calm deliberation, at 6 am on a September morning, Polish Army officer Witold Pilecki, a man with a wife and two children, walked into a German street round-up in Warsaw… and became Auschwitz Prisoner No. 4859. Pilecki had volunteered for a secret mission: Smuggle out intelligence about the new German concentration camp in occupied Poland at Oświęcim--the village called Auschwitz by the Germans--and build a resistance organisation amongst the prisoners. Beginning in 1940, he organized inmates to infiltrate the camp leadership, helped maintain morale among the prisoners by making them aware that they had not been forgotten by Polish forces, and planned a rebellion and an escape with the assistance of the Home Army and the Polish Government in Exile.
He barely survived almost three years of hunger, disease and brutality, and accomplished most of his mission at Auschwitz before escaping in April 1943. Pilecki's first clandestine intelligence reports from Auschwitz, received by the Allies in 1941, were amongst the earliest. After Pilecki’s escape, the Home Army never had adequate strength in the district for a camp uprising, without risking a massacre.
Pilecki's further acts of heroism included fighting in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, holding off a German panzer division for two weeks then hiding out until he was taken prisoner. He returned to Poland after the war as a spy for the Polish Government in Exile, supporting anti-Communist organizations. He was arrested by the Communists, tortured, tried, and executed as a traitor in 1948. And then was rehabilitated as a hero only in the 1990s, after the fall of communism in Poland.
The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery (Aquila Polonica, 2012) is the translation of Pilecki's third, most comprehensive firsthand report, written in 1945. The Polish Cultural Institute New York joins the Museum of Jewish Heritage for a discussion of the book, led by Prof. Timothy Snyder of Yale University, a historian and the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, and a frequent contributor to publications including the New York Review of Books. Also participating in the talk with Professor Snyder is Museum of Jewish Heritage Director David G. Marwell. The discussion of The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery is presented by the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust and the Polish Cultural Institute New York, in collaboration with Aquila Polonica publishers.
Event details:
Wednesday, January 9, 2013, 7 PM
Museum of Jewish Heritage
36 Battery Place, New York, NY
Editor: SRS
Source: polishculture-nyc.org, www.theauschwitzvolunteer.com