
A Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz (2012) - Moodles
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/10/the-man-who-volunteered-for-auschwitz/263083/?single_page=true
======
frytaz
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki)

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warmwaffles
Also a really good song about the guy
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvDg7UftJw8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvDg7UftJw8)

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bobthechef
Another man with a related story was Jan Karski [0]. Interestingly, Jozef
Cyrankiewicz, future communist PM of Poland who testified against Pilecki,
smuggled Karski out from the Nazis.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Karski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Karski)

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divbyzer0
Excellent book by Jan Karski.

Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World. Reads like fiction. He also
entered a concentration camp to report on the activities there.

Interviews with him can be found on youtube.

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spunker540
It’s amazing how quickly our Russian allies turned into our Cold War enemies
at the end of WWII. I’ve heard a lot of blame on both sides, the US
stockpiling arms, McCarthyism fanning the flames. But the end of this story
drives home just how brutal Russia was. A wwii hero who not only deliberately
went to Auschwitz for three years, organized prisoners, compiled intelligence
reports, then escaped and fought bravely for the resistance in Warsaw and
somehow survives it all ends up getting tortured and killed by Russians a few
years after the war.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
This is a bone of contention and a heavily discussed subject, because the
world is not a black-and-white place. The Red Army _was_ indeed a savior. It
is thanks to those masses of poor soldiers, of which eight millions died, that
the horror of WWII last only five years or so. All Europe and all world indeed
should be grateful to them.

On the other hand, there was the Stalinist regime, ruthless rule, killing
one's own people and others - for power and control. Whenever someone makes
any judgement about Russians, they make a generalizing mistake. On top of
that, I'd be very careful when making judgements about people's behaviors in
extreme situations, it's quite easy to make that at a distance.

~~~
badpun
> The Red Army was indeed a savior. It is thanks to those masses of poor
> soldiers, of which eight millions died, that the horror of WWII last only
> five years or so. All Europe and all world indeed should be grateful to
> them.

That is under a big assumption that Stalin's USSR was actually better than
Hitler's Germany. Since there were lots of people who fled Soviet-occupied
parts of Poland into German-occupied ones (hoping that life under Hitler will
be less of a horror), this is not really clear whether the cure was not worse
than the disease.

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olavk
It would very much depends on who you were. If you had German ancestry you
would be better off under the Germans, if you were Jewish you were far worse
off. A lot of people in the former USSR occupied areas like the Baltics or
Ukraine actually greeted the Germans as liberators, but they quickly changed
their mind when they realized the Germans considered Slavs subhumans.

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b0rsuk
Hitler had this list of peoples to exterminate:

    
    
      * Jews
      * Romanies ("gypsies")
      * Slavs (Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs, modern Macedonians, Serbs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Slovenians...)
    

Jews took the biggest blow, but Hitler didn't plan to stop there. And not all
of it was even ethnic. For example, he hated homosexuals and disabled people.
He was going to clean the race. Communists were a target, too.

The reason he didn't exterminate everyone at the same time is that he needed
slaves and collaborators in the transitional period. People down the list
could be used to exterminate those higher up (indirectly, but sometimes
directly).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum)

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greedo
As well as almost any Polish professionals: Teachers, professors, lawyers,
government officials, religious figures. The goal of the Germans was to
dismantle almost all of Polish society and replace it with German society.

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zeveb
The Soviets _also_ had the goal of exterminating the Polish professional
class, hence their massacres at Katyn & elsewhere of, among others, Polish Boy
Scouts.

Few people realise that the Soviet Union took roughly one-third of Poland when
it & Germany invaded Poland at the beginning of the Second World War — and it
kept that territory _after_ the war. Polish society in those conquered
territories was replaced with Russian society.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
This is the point of view taught in Polish schools, so it's unthinkable for a
Pole to think otherwise. However, Lithuanians, Belorussians and Ukrainians
would beg to disagree.

For me the most fascinating is the case of Lithuania. Polish children are
taught about the Commonwealth, common history, fighting together... So when
they hear about anti-Polish sentiment there, it makes no sense to them. People
are surprised and can't understand it. That's the fault of presenting a one-
sided version of history and completely ignoring the POV of your neighbors.

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SpaceInvader
While this article in general is fine, some of the details are wrong. Namely -
he died on 25th of May, not 22nd as written there, also he was arrested May
8th not 5th. Not sure about the other details, I didn't had time to check it.

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tryonqc
I finished reading Pilecki's reports (turned into a book) a year after
visiting auschwitz. The reports are quite hard to read. I just had to know how
somebody could get out of that camp. (Being in the military, he knew many
people in the camp that helped him along the way)

This article is a great follow-up story for the book.

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dandare
In my book, Witold Pilecki is in the same folder as Irena Sendlerowa, a Polish
nurse who smuggled hundreds of Jewish kids from the ghetto, who was tortured
so severely that the Nazis bastinado-fractured her feet - to no avail. Un-
fucking-believable bravery that inspires me every day to resist the silly
trumps and putins of our time.

~~~
konpoly
Putin actually has his opponents murdered. Look up what happened to Boris
Nemtsov, he was gunned down right outside the Kremlin. I would take Trump over
Putin any day.

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totalZero
What's more, Nemtsov isn't the only one who was killed by Putin.

Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with processed Po-210, which was determined
to have come from a facility owned by the Russian state. It was placed in his
tea by two Russian agents, and an investigation by the British government
concluded that Putin probably personally signed off on the murder.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko)

[http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090324/htt...](http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090324/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/report)

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pmoriarty
Some other good articles on Pilecki: [1] [2]

Of his imprisonment under the Soviets he told his wife:

 _" I cannot live. They killed me. Because compared to them Auschwitz was just
a trifle."_

[1] - [http://www.poloniainstitute.net/witold-pilecki-bravery-
beyon...](http://www.poloniainstitute.net/witold-pilecki-bravery-beyond-
measure/)

[2] - [https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/story-of-
the-m...](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/story-of-the-man-who-
volunteered-for-auschwitz.html)

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
Sadly, Pilecki was killed by the fellow Poles, not by Soviet Russians. The
article you quoted makes goes even as far as to distort the reality:

> His Soviet prosecutor, Czesław Łapiński, died on the way to the hospital,
> before his trial for judicial murder.

This person wasn't Soviet - he was a Pole, born in Silesia, a Polish soldier
fighting the Nazi. I know it's more convenient to portray it as "the Russians
were guilty of all wrong", but the reality is that during the Stalinist rule
many atrocities were committed by Poles on Poles.

This point o view is actually present in the official version of the history
as taught in many countries, with a notable exception of Germany: one's own
country is always portrayed at its best, and its citizens as good fellows. The
idea that one's ancestors might commit many atrocious crimes is terrifying.
Yet, it is often the case. In this particular situation, some people were
motivated by greed, some by their survival instinct, but some were just firm
believers in Communism and were convinced they do the right thing. To them,
Pilecki was just a bandit and a traitor. It's important to be aware of that,
because this lesson from the past has bearing on present and future, for
whoever is able to reason and draw conclusions.

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scott_karana
Soviet doesn't necessarily equate to Russian, in the same way that you can be
a non-German Nazi...

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retox
"Hacker News"

~~~
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

