replaced by numbers in the text could not be deciphered. I found the “key” containing the names and corresponding numbers, two months later in the Archives of the State Protection Office in Warsaw.
It was found among the materials confiscated from Pilecki during his arrest, by officers of the Ministry of Public Security in May 1947, and contained a list of more than two hundred names of Auschwitz prisoners, numbered consecutively from eight to over two hundred. Using the data contained in the discovered “key”, one could substitute the numbers in the text of “Witold’s Report” with the first and last names of the prisoners. By doing so, the report was readable again, which enabled me to publish it together with an extensive account of the source and footnotes. This unique text, entitled “Witold’s Report”, was published a quarter of a century ago in the “Bulletin of the Auschwitz Preservation Society” No. 12 in 1991.
In turn, the Polish historian in exile, Józef Garliński, a Home Army officer and former KL Auschwitz prisoner, had found over half a cen-tury ago the second comprehensive report on this camp, which Witold Pilecki wrote in Italy in the second half of 1945. It consisted of over a hundred pages of typescript and was kept in the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust in London. In it, Pilecki described his stay in Auschwitz and activities in the camp military conspiracy. In the text of the second unique account, Pilecki also used numbers instead of names. Although he compiled a separate “key” with a list of Ausch-witz conspirators, it has unfortunately not been found to this day.
Following years of painstaking work, during which Józef Garliński, compared the text of this account with other sources and conducted many conversations on the subject, as well as extensive correspondence with former prisoners of Auschwitz, he reconstructed the partly lost ‘key’ and, based on the above account and reconstruction, wrote a book entitled “Fighting Auschwitz”, published for the first time in London in 1974 with numerous reissues afterwards, including, above all, translation into English.
One of the main characters of Garliński’s book is Pilecki presented in the context of the heroic struggles of the camp conspiracy. The use of his account, which was created just after the war, made the author the first to debunk several myths, insinuations and falsifications in the presentation of the Oświęcim underground.
I reconstructed the aforementioned post-war report by Pilecki, comprehensively and more accurately, having at my disposal the ‘key’ to the previous “Witold’s Report” of 1943. I published it as the second part of my earlier mentioned book “Cavalry Captain Pilecki. The Vol-unteer to Auschwitz”, which was first published in Poland twenty years ago.
The search for the missing ‘key’ to Cavalry Captain Pilecki’s post-war report is a task that historians are yet to accomplish. The “key” would permit full decoding of this report and further enrich the existing knowledge of the Polish military conspiracy at Auschwitz. Its discov-ery would be a great success and an important historical find. So far, no one has succeeded, including Jack Fairweather, who, along with his team of documentalists, has also searched for documents related to Pilecki’s underground activities in the camp, in the English, American and Swiss archives.
In September 1940, Witold Pilecki was sent to KL Auschwitz. He voluntarily allowed himself to be captured during a round-up in Warsaw and, upon crossing the camp gate, became number 4859. As an officer of the Polish Army in striped camp uniform, he carried out his perilous mission in Auschwitz, creating a Polish military resistance movement. For the prisoners, whose only purpose until then was to survive, he aroused hope and the will to fight. His reports, sent mainly through prisoners released from the camp or fugitives, were a dra-matic call for help. However, despite their terrifying content, no aid was forthcoming from outside the camp wires.
Fairweather’s book is read in great suspense, and one is unable to detach oneself from its content. Particularly revealing are its excerpts, describing the transfer of Pilecki’s reports to the Polish government in London and the Allies through couriers, such as the Swede named Swed Norman, or the Polish courier Napoleon Segieda, whose success in transferring these reports to the West is merely incredible.