Military Review English Edition November-December 2013

R E V I E W E S S AY out—through the crematorium chimneys.” The use of gas to kill people began the following year. What Fritzsch meant was that once the Auschwitz victim was murdered by overwork, starvation, torture, bullet, lethal injection, or beating, his ashes would then be set free. Pilecki stresses, “the killing started the very day the first transport of Poles was brought.” Wilhelm Brasse (number 3444), whose transport of 460 people arrived in Auschwitz on 31 August 1940, remembered witnessing Jewish men and Polish priests being degraded and worked to death. He saw SS-men and kapos hitching priests to carts and forcing them to pull carts like horses. Pilecki himself witnessed how Poles, Jews, and priests were harnessed to rollers in order to “level” the camp’s parade ground. In addition, kapos and SS-men were particularly sadistic toward Jews. Not only were Jewish victims finished off with overwork in penal companies, their camp tormentors would train dogs to kill them, restrain Jewish men and smash their testicles with hammers, and strangle Jewish men by ordering them to lay down and a kapo would place a spade’s handle on the man’s neck, placing all his weight on the handle. In Leszek Wosiewicz’s 1989 Oscar-nominated film Kornblumenblau (based on the experiences of Auschwitz survivors), an early scene depicts a kapo riding his men-drawn carriage around the camp. Hearing or reading about this episode is already unsettling; however, when viewing it, one becomes more demoralized. By September 1940, Poles already knew to dread and, as best they could, to avoid Auschwitz. Pilecki is not a madman leaping senselessly toward his own destruction. He is not some blindly irrepressible optimist believing that will power, patriotism, and goodness will overcome. His self-appointed mission was to arrive in Auschwitz to establish a military organization to elevate morale; organize and distribute additional food, clothing, and supplies; gather intelligence about the camp, and train inmates to take over the camp and to assist the support troops that Pilecki believed would arrive to liberate the camp. The first phase of the mission was to create cells of resistance and support groups to aid fellow inmates. He felt “a semblance of happiness” when he sensed that the other inmates were beginning to come together to stand firm, as best as they could, against their tormentors. Another aspect MILITARY REVIEW • November-December 2013 of Pilecki’s mission was to fight back, as best as he could, the SS-men and kapos. One memorable act of defiance was when Pilecki’s group cultivated typhus strains and infected SS-personnel. There was no guarantee that Pilecki would end up in his intended target of Auschwitz. When he stepped into a roundup on 19 September 1940, he felt sure he would be sent to Auschwitz. Since the AB Aktion and roundups were still going on, the Nazis could have tortured and executed him in occupied Warsaw’s Pawiak, Mokotów, or any other Gestapo-run prison. They could have taken him to Palmiry to murder him in the forest. At the very least, they could have sent him to a forced labor colony somewhere in Germany. On 22 September 1940, Pilecki received Auschwitz camp number 4859; he says, “The two thirteens (composed by the inner and outer digits) convinced my comrades that I would die; the numbers cheered me up.” The fact that Pilecki avoided death for two years and seven months is miraculous. There were so many times that a blow from a kapo’s fist or baton could have been his last, that illness could have killed him, that the day’s execution list could have contained his name, that the Gestapo could have discovered his true identity (and they came very close to finding out)—his survival really is a miracle. The remarkable element of Pilecki’s time in Auschwitz was the fact that his own escape was successful. The isolation of the camp, the camp’s 40-square kilometers “area of interest,” the intimidation and murder of the local population aiding runaways, the willingness of the locals to assist escapees, and the collective responsibility imposed upon the remaining Auschwitz inmates were very real inhibitors for escape. A shaved head, starved and unhealthy appearance, striped camp uniform, all stymied men and women from escaping. Pilecki must have been blessed not to be one of the 10-20 randomly chosen inmates that camp security would execute as punishment for another inmate’s escape attempt. Henryk ?wiebocki estimates that “a total of 802 people escaped. The largest group of escapees was Poles (396), followed by residents of the former USRR (179), Jews (115), Gypsies (38) . . . 144 successfully escaped and survived the war.” Pilecki also explains that the Gestapo would and did arrest and send the escapee’s family members to Auschwitz. Pilecki’s assumed identity 93

Military Review English Edition November-December 2013 | Page 95