Polish Fighter Who Bared Auschwitz Atrocities Gets Warsaw Monument
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
(JTA) — A monument to a non-Jewish Polish resistance fighter Capt. Witold Pilecki was unveiled in Warsaw.
The monument to the man who during World War II allowed himself to be captured and sent to the Nazi’s Auschwitz death camp so that he could report on the atrocities there was unveiled on Saturday in the presence of Pilecki’s son and daughter and other desendants, the Associated Press reported.
Pilecki allowed himself to be captured by German troops in 1940 in order to provide the anti-Nazi underground and their allies with reports from the camp.
Pilecki wrote and smuggled out secret reports from Auschwitz to his superiors before fleeing in April 1943, where he headed to Warsaw and fought in the Polish resistance.
After the war he went to Italy but returned to Soviet-dominated Poland, where he was executed in 1948 for espionage and treason by the communist authorities. His body was buried in a mass grave.
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