Zdjęcia w artykule: Andrzej Rudiak
StElimelekh i Tamar Landau. Fot. Yad Vashem
the press, and this time I succeeded. My articles appeared in “Tygodnik Powszechny”, “Stolica” and “Morze i Ziemia”. After these publications, I received a request for contact from Ludmiła Serafińska from Nowy Wiśnicz, where Pilecki sought refuge in the summer of 1943 after he escaped from Auschwitz. The conversation with her provided me with plenty of new information and instructions, encouraging me to look for additional archival material and to reach out to witnesses who knew Pilecki. The result of many years of research efforts was the book “Cavalry Captain Witold Pilecki. The Volunteer to Auschwitz”, which was first published in 2000. The second edition extended and supplemented was published in 2014.
In the 1990s, while collecting materials for Witold Pilecki’s biography, I obtained access to all the most important sources and documents related to him, and since then almost no particular discoveries have been made in this area. However, one crucial source remains to be found, which I describe below.
In the 1980s, Polish historians were familiar with Witold Pilecki’s account entitled “W’s Report” (Witold’s Report), which the Cavalry Captain presumably handed over to the Home Army Headquarters in Warsaw as early as the autumn of 1943. It consisted of several dozen typed pages and was stored in the collections of the Central Archive of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (now the Archive of the Polish Left - Branch VI of the Archive of New Files in Warsaw).
I read the report in February 1991. However, it did not have a ‘key’ without which the names replaced