Witold Pilecki was born in the Russian Empire on May 13, 1901 in the town of Olonets in Karelia. In fact he came from the descendants of an aristocratic family (szlachta) from the Grodno region. Grandfather Józef Pilecki h. Leliwa was a Polish shepherd and a special Polish nationalist. He had also been the supporter of the January separatist uprising in 1863-1864. After the uprising was brutally defeated by Russian forces, Józef Pilecki's title was revoked as in the Polish armies supporting the rebellion; His property and other properties near Lida were confiscated by the Russian government. He was also sentenced to exile for 7 years in Siberia. After his release, he and his family were forced by the tsarist authorities to take refuge in remote areas of Karelia. For the next thirty years, the family was banned from living outside this province, and its members depended on the law only to be employed by the Russian state. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Witold's father, Julian Pilecki, studied as a forester in St. Petersburg and started as a senior inspector at the National Forestry Board in Karelia and joined the Russian civil service. He eventually settled in the town of Olonets and married Ludwika Pilecki nee Osiecimba. Witold Pilecki became the fourth of the couple's five children. In 1910 Ludwika and the boys left Karia and moved to North-Western Krai. The family members joined together in Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania), where Pilecki completed elementary school and became a member of the secret organization ZHP Scouts after joining his father. During the First World War Wilno was occupied by the German army on 5 September 1915 and was included in the German administration of Ober Ost. Pilecki and his Mogilev family fled the Eastern Front for Belarus. In 1916 Pilecki went to the city of Oryol, entered the sports hall and founded a local branch of the ZHP group. In 1918, after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I, Pilecki returned to Wilno (now part of the newly independent Second Polish Republic) and joined the ZHP Scout section of the Lithuanian and Belarusian Autonomous Region. The Defense Militia is a paramilitary formation aligned with the White Movement under the direction of General Wladyslaw Wejtko. The militia disarmed the retreating German troops and took on the task of protecting the city from an attack that might soon be carried out by the Soviet Red Army. But Wilno fell to Bolshevik forces on January 5, 1919, and Pilecki and the Union resorted to partisan warfare under Soviet laws. He and his comrades were then drawn to Bialystok, where Pilecki was a szeregowy (special) member of the new Polish volunteer army. Participated in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921, under the auspices of Captain Jerzy Dabrowski. He fought in the Battle of Kiev (1920) and in a cavalry unit defending the city of Grodno. On August 5, 1920, Pilecki participated in the 211th Ulan Regiment and fought in the Great War in Warsaw and in the Rudniki Forest (Puszcza Rudnicka). Pilecki then took part in the liberation of Wilno and briefly joined the Zeligowski uprising of October 1920 in the Polish-Lithuanian War. He was twice awarded the Krzyz Walecznych (Cross of Valor) award for bravery. After the end of the Polish-Soviet War in March 1921, Pilecki was transferred to the army reserve. He was promoted to the rank of corporal. The same year he went on to complete his secondary (mature) education. In 1922 Pilecki briefly went to the University of Poznan and studied agriculture. He returned briefly to Wilno edentered the Faculty of Fine Arts of Stefan Batory University. Pilecki was forced to stop working both in finance and in 1924 due to his father's worsening health. He remained active in the army as a member of the military reserve and worked as a military lecturer in Nowe Swiecice. Pilecki later received officer training at the Subarry Reserve Officer Training School in Grudziadz. After graduation, Pilecki was appointed to the 26th Lancer Regiment from the rank Chorazy (crusader) in July 1925. Pilecki would be promoted to Podporucznik (second lieutenant) the following year. In September 1926 Pilecki became the owner of Sukurcze, his family's ancestral estate in the Lida district of Nowogródek voivodeship. Pilecki rebuilt and modernized the property which had been destroyed during World War I. On 7 April 1931 he married local school teacher Maria Pilecka nee Ostrowska (1906 – 6 February 2002). Two children were born in Wilno: Andrzej (16 January 1932) and Zofia (14 March 1933). Pilecki and his family would then remain in Sukurcze. Pilecki earned a reputation as a community leader, well-known social worker, and amateur painter. He was also a strong supporter of rural development, founding an agricultural cooperative to head a local milk processing plant and the local fire department. In 1932 Pilecki founded a cavalry training school in Lida. Shortly thereafter, he was brought into command of the newly formed 1st Lidsky Fleet, until 1937, when this union joined the Polish 19th Infantry Division. In 1938, Pilecki was awarded the Silver Cross of Merit for community activism and social work. Shortly before the start of World War II, Pilecki served as commander of a cavalry unit. He was later appointed to General Józef Kwaciszewski's 19th Infantry Division. The Unit participated in a hard fight against the German advance in the Polish occupation. Pilecki's platoon was almost completely destroyed on September 10 after the clash with the Panzer Kempf division. After the Polish government officially surrendered to Nazi Germany on September 27, 1939, Pilecki and many other men continued to fight as partisans. The division was disbanded on October 17, and some parts surrendered to the enemies. Pilecki began hiding in Warsaw with the commander Major Wlodarkiewicz. On November 9, 1939, two men founded the Polish Secret Army (Tajna Armia Polska, TAP), one of the first clandestine organizations in Poland. Pilecki expanded to include Siedlce, Radom, Lublin and other centers in central Poland, not just Warsaw, becoming TAP's organizational commander. In 1940, Pilecki presented his plan to enter the Auschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim, collect camp intelligence from the inside, and organize resistance in custody. Until then very little was known about how the Germans ran the camp, and it was thought to be a normal prison camp and not an extermination camp. The superiors approved the plan and gave him a fake ID on behalf of “Tomasz Serafinski”. On 19 September 1940, while on a tour through the streets of Warsaw (âApanka), he deliberately went out and was captured by the Germans, along with 2,000 civilians (including Wladyslaw Bartoszewski). Pilecki was sent to Auschwitz and assigned inmate number 4859. During his imprisonment Pilecki was promoted to the rank of Porucznik (first lieutenant) by the Home Army. While working in Auschwitz, various kommandos and surviving pneumonia, Pilecki organized the Underground Military Organizations (ZOW). ZOW provided valuable field intelligence to the Polish underworld. From October 1940 the ZOW reported to Warsaw, and in March 1941 Pilecki's reports were forwarded to theBritish government in London through the Polish resistance. In 1942, Pilecki's resistance movement published details of inmate conditions and the number of arrivals and deaths in the camp, and used a radio transmitter made by camp prisoners. The secret radio station, built using seven-and-a-half-year-old fugitive fragments, published until the fall of 1942, when it was dismantled by Pilecki's men out of fear that the Germans might discover it due to "a big mouth of our friend." These reports were a major source of intelligence on Auschwitz for the Western Allies. When Pilecki was assigned to the night shift in a camp bakery outside the compound, he and two companions overpowered a guard, cut the telephone line and fled on the night of April 26-27, 1943, taking with them the documents stolen from the Germans. . When the Warsaw Uprising broke out on August 1, 1944, Pilecki volunteered to serve in Kedyw's Chrobry II battalion. Pilecki initially served as a joint soldier in the northern center of the city. After many officers were killed in the fierce battle that erupted in the first days of the uprising, Pilecki announced his true identity and accepted command of the 1st “Warszawianka” Company at Sródmiescie in central Warsaw. Pilecki fought under the guerrilla called “Captain Roman”. Their forces remained in a fortified area, one of the outermost partisan redoubts, called the “Great Warsaw Bastion”. Pilecki and his men duly took control of a strategically placed building overlooking the city's important western-eastern Jerusalem Boulevard, resulting in heavy losses to German supply lines and significant logistical challenges. The fortress was held for two weeks under continuous attacks by German infantry and armored vehicles. After the uprising's capitulation, Pilecki hid a cache of weapons in a private apartment and surrendered to the Wehrmacht on October 5, 1944. He was imprisoned in Stalag VIII-B, a German prison camp near Lamsdorf, Silesia. He was subsequently transferred to Oflag VII-A in Murnau, Bavaria, where he was liberated by troops of the American 12th Armored Division on 28 April 1945. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945, Pilecki was sent to Great Britain as a forces officer Polish armies in the West. In July 1945, Ancona was reassigned to the military intelligence section of the Polish II Corps under General Wladyslaw Anders in Italy. While assigned, Pilecki began writing a monograph about his experiences at Auschwitz. In October 1945, when relations between the extreme Polish government and the Soviet-backed Boleslaw Bierut regime broke down, Pilecki received orders from General Anders and intelligence chief Lieutenant Colonel Stanislaw Kijak to return to Poland and report on the prevailing military and political situation during the Soviet occupation. In mid-1946, Pilecki's network successfully linked up with Polish anti-Soviet partisans and established an underground courier system to send information from Warsaw to the Polish II Corps Center in Italy. However, the biggest success was the recruitment of Captain Wawel Alchimowicz, who is the official of the Polish Ministry of Public Security (MBP), the communist secret police. In April 1947, he began collecting evidence of Soviet atrocities committed in Poland during the 1939–1941 occupation, as well as evidence on Home Army veterans and prosecutions of former members of the Polish Armed Forces illegally detained in the West, who was convicted . to imprisonment. On March 3, 1948, a show was held. The statements against Pilecki were presented by the future prime 6.