Author Liesel K. Hill's Musings on Fantasia...
Showing posts with label WWII. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WWII. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Historical Tidbit: The Heroism of Witold Pilecki
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| Witold Pilecki (Source) |
That a polish spy purposely got himself taken to Auschwitz in WWII just to prove that it was a death camp, rather than a prison camp?
It's true. Witold Pilecki is apparently the stuff of legend, though we don't hear much about him in the states.
Pileck was a revolutionary by birth. He was born in 1901 in Russia where his family had been forced to settle by the Tsarist regime. His grandfather, Jozef, did seven years in exile in Siberia for participating in the Polish uprising.
He moved to Lithuania in 1910 to finish commercial school, then back to Russia in 1916. During WWI, his ZHP Scout section in Wilno joined in the fighting against the Bolesheviks. When his sector was overrun, his unit turned to partisan warfare behind enemy lines. He also fought in the Polish retreat from Kiev and was decorated several times.
After the war, he passed exams and joined the Polish army. He also married Maria Ostrowska and together they had two children. Though he'd been in the reserves, Pilecki was mobilized in 1939. He and his unit fought the Germans as they advanced across Poland, suffering many casualties.
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