eLimmud South Africa 31 May 2020

Witold Pilecki is perhaps the greatest unsung hero of World War II. A non-Jewish Polish soldier, he volunteered to be infiltrated into Auschwitz and spent two and a half years there, not only surviving but organising an extensive resistance network in the camp. He chronicled the murders and tortures meted out, and the transformation of a modest labour camp into the giant centrepiece of Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. His first-hand accounts were smuggled to the Polish government-in-exile, from which they reached the Allied leadership.