History's Secret Heroes: Series 3: Witold Pilecki: The Infiltrator

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You're about to listen to a brand new series of History's Secret Heroes. Episodes will be released on Tuesdays, wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK and can't wait, you can hear the full series right now before anywhere else. First on BBC Sounds.

Witold Polecki heard shouting in the cool autumn air outside the window of his small apartment. Trucks drove down the streets of Nazi-occupied Warsaw.
It was the 19th of September 1940.

There's a knock on the door. It's the building's caretaker who says

You've got to run. The Germans are coming.
They've just sealed off the streets. Poletsky thanked the caretaker.

They then hear the sound of bangs and dogs barking and then suddenly there's banging at the door to the building and the caretaker appears again and says this is it you've got seconds to get out.

Downstairs a door crashed open. The sound of heavy boots echoed up the stairs.
Fists pounded on the apartment door. There might still be time to hide in the cellar.

The sister-in-law goes to open the door. Poletsky is in a bedroom.
He looks over because his little nephew, Marek, is in his crib.

He's wide awake and Pileckski sees that he's dropped his teddy bear on the ground and

just as the Germans are entering the apartment to seize him, he picks up the teddy bear and hands it to Marek and says, see you soon.

So far, everything had gone to plan.

He is deliberately wanting to get arrested by the Germans. That is his mission.

I'm Helena Bonham Carter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance, and courage from World War II.

Witold Polecki, the infiltrator.

It was dark when the train screeched to a halt. The door swung open and guards shone torches into the carriage.
They shouted, Out! Out! Out!

Among the mass of bodies, Poletsky was hustled out. He had been packed into a cattle truck with about 60 other prisoners that had been brought from Warsaw.

Jack Fairweather is the author of The Volunteer. They had no idea what was in store for them.

Poledsky could see the outline of a barbed wire fence and a gateway over which were the words, Abeit Macht Frei.

Work sets you free. A line of guards wore jackets with the word Kapo emblazoned on the arms.
Kapos were prisoner functionaries who were forced by the Nazis to help with the camps.

They sorted the prisoners into groups of ten and removed their valuables, including watches and rings.

Several Polish prisoners were shot summarily as they were entering, just because that was part of the terror that the SS wanted to instill.

One of the capos struck a man with his club until he cowered on the ground, covered in blood. The Kapo called out, This is Auschwitz concentration camp, my dear sirs.

Inside, Polecki and the other new arrivals were gathered for a roll call. They were addressed by a deputy commandant.
He points

over to the crematorium chimney, which they could just see, and says, this is your only way out of the camp, as smoke threw that column.

Witold Polecki was born into a well-to-do Polish-speaking family in May 1901. They lived in Oronac, a small town in what was then the Russian Empire.

As a youth, he enrolled at university in Vilnus to study painting, but when his father fell ill, he had to abandon his course and take over running the family estate.

You know, a really understated guy who could talk to you about

fine art, he could talk to you about religious poetry, he could talk to you about what to plant in eastern Poland in March and how to get the best honey.

He married a woman named Maria and they had two children, Anje and Sofia. He was sort of the stay-at-home dad because his wife Maria was the school teacher in the local village.

Poletski was called up to join the Polish army before Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Poland was swiftly defeated and its territory divided up.

Afterwards, Poletsky left his role as a platoon commander and cycled to Warsaw to continue the fight.

In Warsaw, he lodged with his sister-in-law Eleanora and her young son, Marek.

From her apartment, Eleonora and Polecki helped to form one of Warsaw's first underground resistance cells, the secret Polish Army. Poletsky recruited members.

By December, he had nearly 100 young men gathering intelligence on the occupying German forces.

In July 1940, a member of Polecki's network was arrested. Weeks passed without any news of him.
Then the secret Polish army heard that the Germans were deporting prisoners to a camp.

They had set up a camp a few months before outside the small Polish city of Osvincyn, which they had renamed Auschwitz,

and no one knew what was happening in that camp. In August, it was reported that the secret Polish Army's chief of staff had also been imprisoned in the camp.

Details were scant. To find out what was happening inside Auschwitz, the resistance needed to infiltrate it.
What they wanted was someone to get themselves arrested and sent to Auschwitz.

to then work out what was happening there, get the reports back to them, which they could then pass on to the Allies. Poledski knew this mission was incredibly dangerous.

If he wasn't shot on entry, he could be interrogated and exposed as a member of the Resistance.

He took some days to think it over. Eventually, he decided to go ahead.
But he chose not to tell his wife, Maria.

So, on the 19th of September 1940, when the Gestapo rounded up men of fighting age in Warsaw, Poledsky made sure he was among them. I was very young in that time, two and a half years.

This is Marek Ostrovsky. My uncle was Vital Pileckski.
I was nephew.

Poledsky spent weeks devising a plan with Eleonora, who would help pass on any intelligence he could smuggle out to the underground.

But no amount of preparation could make leaving his family behind any easier. My teddy bear fell down on the floor and

the uncle took the teddy bear, give me and kissed me my front head. The teddy bear was my best friend.
At this stage, Auschwitz was not yet the industrialized death camp it would become.

It was a brutal concentration camp used for a range of prisoners, many of whom were put to work.

Some were killed by the guards or by the harsh conditions. From the moment he arrived, Poledsky could see that the aim of the SS was to rob all inmates of their humanity.

They were then brought to be registered, stripped of all their clothes, shaved, beaten. Jewish prisoners were quickly identified by their circumcisions and laid into with a special fury.

The people they had arrested in Warsaw no longer had names, but numbers that they were to be identified by. Poledsky was assigned inmate number 4859.

He was given a small card. Carrying this, he went into the washroom, where Acapo immediately struck him on the face with a club.
The rule was that you had to carry the card in your mouth.

Poletsky had it in his hand. Reeling from the blow, Poledsky spat out two broken teeth.
He sort of described it like stepping into another world where all the rules of morality were inverted.

How on earth would he send messages outside? On his first full day, Poledsky was given the role of room supervisor. This allowed him the opportunity to befriend new inmates.

If he was to form a resistance cell, Poledsky quickly realised that he needed to keep morale up, and with it, hope. For instance, food should be dealt out fairly.

Simply to be kind to his fellow prisoners to share some common decency in this kind of nightmarish scenario was itself an act of resistance. He was careful who he approached.

One of his very first recruits, this young man, whose name was Khan, looked at Paletsky and said, Are you mad? Like, how can we resist the Germans in a place like this?

He began to realize though that Poletsky in sharing the secret of the underground had entrusted him with his life effectively and that that faith in him in each other was itself a very powerful act of resistance and was to be the secret of the underground.

Poletsky found other members of the Warsaw Underground who were in Auschwitz and set about creating a series of resistance cells. These cells were kept secret from each other.

Prisoners were told to write home regularly in German, stating that they were alive and well. Poledsky sent messages to his sister-in-law Eleonora through the camp mail office.

Fortunately, after a few weeks, my mother received a

postcard.

The message said, Auntie plants trees that grow really well.

That was a code. It means that he starts to organize

underground organization in a camp. These brief official letters were closely monitored.
Of course, they could not convey the realities of life inside Auschwitz.

Weeks later, though, an opportunity presented itself for Polecki to send a longer message. Poltsky learned that a fellow prisoner, a guy called Alexander Vilopolsky, was to be released.

A member of Polecki's network knew the capo guarding Vylopolsky and was confident he could pass something on. But they could not risk giving him a written document.

Poletsky passed on this oral message, line for line, memorised. It contained details of the events he'd witnessed, along with the estimated death toll of 1,000 men.

The message also included a direct plea to the Allies.

To paraphrase, please for the love of God bomb the camp even if it means killing all of us prisoners in it because what's happening here has to stop.

Even if hundreds of prisoners died in a bombing, Poledski believed the destruction of Auschwitz would put an end to what he called the Nazis monstrous torture.

Wilopolski was released at the end of October. Soon afterwards, he met members of the Warsaw Underground to dictate Poledzki's report to them.

It was then smuggled by a series of Polish underground operatives across occupied Europe to the Polish government in exile in London. They received it in December and shared it with the British.

The head of RAF Bomber Command expressed interest in targeting Auschwitz. He sent a request to the Air Ministry.
It would have been the longest

raid by a British bomber carried out by the war. Yet Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal rejected the idea.

He wrote, I think you will agree that apart from any political considerations, an attack on the Polish concentration camp at Osvinchem

is an undesirable diversion and unlikely to achieve its purpose.

The weight of bombs that could be carried to a target at this distance with the limited force available would be very unlikely to cause enough damage to enable prisoners to escape.

This is really like one of those historical

might-have-been moments.

The political message was precisely the one that needed to be sent to the Nazi leadership, to the world, that Auschwitz was this emerging center of evil in the heart of the Nazi empire.

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In January 1941, Poletsky developed pneumonia. He was sent to Auschwitz's hospital wing.

There, on a radio, he listened to the BBC's German service. The news was grim.
The Blitz was raging. German bombers were devastating British cities.

There was no chance the Allies could muster the air strength to bomb Auschwitz.

Poletzki recovered and was put back to work in the camp. As the war intensified and the Nazi leadership became more radicalized, then the final solution began to emerge with devastating consequences.

On the morning of the 22nd of June, news reached the camp that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. Over the following months, Poletsky saw hundreds of Soviet prisoners of war arrive at Auschwitz.

The Nazis began an experiment in mass killing. They exterminated around 600 of these prisoners with the poison gas, Zyklon B.

Poletsky wrote, the men had been so tightly packed that even in death they could not fall over.

By November, Soviet inmate numbers were growing rapidly. Construction began on a new sub-camp two miles away, Birkenau, known sometimes as Auschwitz II.

Poletsky tried to find out how many inmates had died at Auschwitz. According to his source in the camp's record office, over 3,000 Soviet prisoners of war had been killed in a month.

As the camp expanded and it became this huge bureaucracy of mass murder and there were prisoners who worked as clerks, there was much more access to both papers and documents and so it made it possible then to begin writing written reports.

Poletsky shared the new figures with another inmate who was to be released in November. He hoped that the news would reach the Allies.

In the spring of 1942, increasing numbers of Jewish people, including women and children, were brought to Auschwitz. Still, there was no sign that the Allied intervention was coming.

Poletsky knew he had to get more news out to the Polish resistance outside the camp. Every day, life and death inside Auschwitz became increasingly fraught.
He described seeing a Jewish family.

There was a little boy in that group who looked about 10 years old, which is the same age as his son, and there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop him being shot and murdered.

It was this terrible dilemma he had that had they acted to save that one boy, then that would have, you know,

exposed him potentially and led to the underground getting into danger. Lying in his bunk that night, Poledsky was racked with guilt.

He had exhausted all options to get news from Auschwitz out to the Polish resistance.

All but one.

His own escape.

By the end of 1942, multiple reports had reached the Allies about what was happening in Auschwitz. In December, Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, spoke about it in the House of Commons.

He read out a joint declaration by the United States, Britain, and nine other nations, stating that Germany had embarked on a bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination.

This declaration attracted widespread news coverage.

We have subsequent debates among the Allied leadership, some including featuring Winston Churchill, in which they're talking again about bombing Auschwitz, and they actually

refer back to Portal's first decision and say, oh, yes, well, it's just physical.

What's the point? But the point is that not enough people knew what Auschwitz was. In a memo from early January 1943, Air Chief Marshal Portal said that a small-scale attack in Poland was possible.

He remained unconvinced, though, that it would deter the Nazis from their policy. Churchill, too, believed it would be more effective to devote resources to liberating Europe.

Meanwhile, the Nazis refined their processes of killing.

As part of what they called the final solution, Jews from all over the territories they occupied were brought to Auschwitz and other death camps.

The Zyklon B method that the Nazis had first tried on Soviet prisoners of war was now used to gas prisoners at an industrial scale.

At its peak around this time, in Auschwitz alone, the average number of Jewish people being gassed each day reached 6,000.

Inside Auschwitz, Poledsky planned an escape. He finally hit on a plan to join a unit of prisoners who worked in a civilian bakery outside the camp and joined the night shift.

On the night of the 26th of April 1943, Poledsky put his plan into action.

Along with two accomplices, Jan Redze and Edvad Czeschelski, he walked through the gates of the bakery and joined the night shift already in progress.

There were SS guards around, so they needed to keep up the appearance of baking. Poledsky began to make dough.
Redze had already made a replica of the key to the main door of the bakery.

Got a piece of dough and pressed the key into the dough and then took the dough back to the camp and then passed it on through his underground network. Two SS guards were present.

One grilled a sausage over the boiler while the other wrote a letter at a desk. The bakers took a short break.
Redze unscrewed the dead bolts on the door to the outside world.

A guard checked on them but didn't notice the bolts had been interfered with. He returned to grilling his sausage.

Meanwhile, Czeselski cut the phone cables in the corridor. By now, the other guard had fallen asleep.
Czeselski quickly threw the fallen piece into the fire.

The smell of burning rubber alerted the first guard. The guard searched around, but couldn't see anything in the fire.
He swore at Czeselski and went back to his sausage again.

Poletsky knew they didn't have much time. Redze waited for an opportunity.

The precise moment when, between the batches of loaves being made, tried the key and then turned out that the dough had been out of shape, the key didn't work.

They kept pushing, but the key wouldn't turn.

In this moment of utter desperation, all Poletsky and these other two escapers just threw themselves at the door and basically kicked it down as the guards began rushing back towards them and they sprinted off into the night.

The men heard shots fired at their backs. There was nothing to do but run on towards the Soa River.
They ran for 10 miles at night. Incredibly, all of them got away.

After 947 days inside the camp, Polecki was free. To reach a Polish resistance safe house, he had to walk over 100 kilometers on foot, dodging the authorities and informants at every turn.
He did it.

and was greeted by a member of the resistance. He seizes the man and says, we've got to go back back immediately and attack Auschwitz.
Get your men together.

Poledski decided he must travel to Warsaw to urge the resistance to take action.

The city was almost unrecognisable. He saw his sister-in-law, Eleonora.
He was also briefly reunited with his wife, Maria, and later with his two children.

When Poledski met Polish resistance leaders, he was shocked to learn that some thought his reports from Auschwitz were exaggerated, or even that he was a German agent.

The guy says to Molek, do you know what is happening in the war? The Soviet Red Army was advancing towards Poland. We are facing

a national fight for survival. We don't care about what is happening in Auschwitz.

The Polish Home Army could not be persuaded to attack Auschwitz. Soon, he learned that most of the resistance leaders in the camp had been rounded up and executed.

All he could do was try to write down everything he had seen and done during his time in Auschwitz.

The following summer, 1944, Polecki joined the Warsaw Uprising. This rebellion attempted to push out the German occupation and reclaim Polish independence.

Pletski was in the middle of the fighting, but not the fighting that he wanted to do because his heart was still very much in Auschwitz.

But the uprising failed. Poletsky was captured again and sent to another concentration camp in Bavaria.
Yet the tide of war had turned.

In the spring of 1945, Allied troops swept across Europe, driving the Nazis back. American soldiers freed Polecki from his second camp.

He'd spent some time in Italy and scribbled out this report, 100 or so pages, describing in this raw and unprocessed ways the horror of his experience.

Poledsky was relatively safe in Italy, but this did not satisfy him. The Soviets had taken over Poland and turned it into a satellite state.
It was still not free.

The winter after the war ended, Poletsky returned to Warsaw to rejoin the underground resistance.

He was nursing this sort of psychic hurt of having been in Auschwitz and that guilt of having known that he'd survived where many of his friends had not.

Regardless of the danger and the threat to his family, Polecki felt he must fight. He decided to create a new cell to oppose

the Soviet takeover of the country. On the 8th of May, 1947, Poledski was captured by Polish communist authorities.

He was accused of spying and of planning to assassinate key figures in the Polish police. Eventually, he was coerced into signing a false confession.
He was found guilty. He was shot.

in the back of his head.

In the years after his death, Poletsky was condemned as an enemy of the state. He is not a traitor.
It was the propaganda.

Today, his nephew Marek can hardly imagine how Poletsky kept going inside Auschwitz. It is really difficult for us to understand

how he managed to do many outstanding actions.

His achievements could be enough for ten brave people.

The communist authorities filed away Poletki's reports in archives. For the next two decades, the Polish government suppressed Poletzky's work.

It was only in the 1970s that a Polish historian, himself an Auschwitz prisoner, got access to the report and began

the first step towards remembering Poletsky's heroic actions and writing about his mission to the camp.

In 1990, Vitolt Polecki finally received a posthumous exoneration. His report on Auschwitz was published the following year.

We're at a point in history when there's only a few hundred survivors, if that, of the horrors of Auschwitz.

And through Poletsky's story, we can see the sort of call to our humanity to engage with the suffering, suffering around us.

He's not a sort of Superman. He's kind of an average guy drawn into these extraordinary events.

Next time on History's Secret Heroes, two apprentice seamstresses find an ingenious hiding place for their Jewish colleagues in wartime Sarajevo.

They are only allowed to leave under cover of darkness, but they spend their days locked in a closet and with the young women bringing them food. The Salon al-Bahari.

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