Military Review English Edition November-December 2013 | Page 98

Prisoners from the first transport to KL Auschwitz at the train station in Tarnów (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Archives)

something good, for once, came out from the
abyss. The Auschwitz Volunteer is truly a gift.
However, how many other heroes remain in the
memory hole?
Much has changed since Czes?aw Mi?osz wrote
The Captive Mind (1951), but his words are still
relevant. He writes, “A living human being,
even if he be thousands of miles away, is not so
easily ejected from one’s memory. If he is being
tortured, his voice is heard at the very least by
those people who have (uncomfortable as it may
be for them) a vivid imagination. And even if he
is already dead, he is still part of the present.”
Orwell did not need to suffer in a totalitarian
regime to recognize the dangers of “Who controls
the past controls the future: who controls the
present controls the past.” Pilecki’s case makes
Mi?osz and Orwell’s insights all the more real,
and Mi?osz lived long enough to see that Pilecki
returned as a presence in the now.
This history of World War II disillusions us;
the “good war” was not as straightforward or
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principled as we would like to believe. Pilecki’s
heroism may have been doomed, but his courage uplifts us. His example may be difficult to
follow, but he shows what is possible. How are we
finally to make sense of Pilecki? I am reminded
of a well-known inscription found on the walls
of the former Gestapo headquarters of occupied
Warsaw, which today houses the Mausoleum of
Struggle and Martyrdom Museum. It reads—
It is easy to speak about Poland.
It is harder to work for her.
Even harder to die for her.
And the hardest to suffer for her.
This epitaph defines Pilecki.
My one complaint about this edition of The
Auschwitz Volunteer is that, even with the
now available paperback edition, it is still too
expensive to use in a college course. If we want
our young people not to grow up cynically, we
should not make it easier for them to become so
by restricting them from knowing real heroes
like Pilecki.MR
November-December 2013

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