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00:00We became involved in a terrible way, my dear friends.
00:15A horrible thing, no words to express it.
00:20I wanted to use the word bestiality, but not.
00:25We are by the whole hell far worse than the beasts.
00:30I have full right to write this, especially after what I saw there
00:36and what became to occur in Auschwitz one year later.
00:48Those words must be saved in our collective memory.
00:52They're the words of Captain Witold Pilecki,
00:55an officer in the Polish army who joined the resistance against the Nazis.
01:02His mission?
01:04To infiltrate Auschwitz.
01:07They're the singer who joined us.
01:07They're the whistleblowers.
01:16They were Margulés.
01:16They were not Gabrielle.
01:17They were trying to listen to us.
01:19Flemmy is one of my favourites.
01:21Only now for the coast over the verm 140 years later.
01:24Utwarsrill.
01:25They were found some science.
01:28It's alive with her children.
01:29Pythory is giving away the life harder for life.
01:31Part of this.
01:33Let's do it.
01:34So that's how I've gåttven.
01:36September 1939. Poland fell in the wake of the combined assault by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
01:48Abandoned by their French and British allies, the country mourned their more than 60,000 dead.
02:06Walsar had crumbled. The independence it had won 20 years earlier had been stripped away.
02:23Along the royal route, the German occupation humiliated the Polish nation.
02:39The Reich troops paraded before Hitler himself.
02:42But beneath the goose-stepping Germans, men were already getting organised in the shadows.
02:58A truly clandestine state quickly comes together in Poland.
03:03The Polish government in exile, first in France and then in London,
03:08will coordinate the implementation of a network of pockets of resistance
03:14that could be considered a resistance army, along with an entire underground civil administration.
03:27As soon as the occupation began, the resistance was printing a clandestine newspaper
03:33and preparing its first acts of sabotage.
03:38Among the leaders of the movement, a certain Witold Pilecki, a Polish army reserve officer.
03:51A patriot. He moved away from the communists and nationalists.
03:58Prior to the war, this 38-year-old grower of red clover lived on his land with his wife Maria, a schoolteacher,
04:06and their two children, Andrzej and Sofia.
04:15Pilecki also cultivated ideas about society that were novel for the time.
04:20He was both a soldier and social activist.
04:26During the 20-year period of independence, when Poland was a free nation, he created his own little community.
04:33Pilecki created a farming association, a brigade of firemen, a dairy cooperative, a battalion of reservists, lots of things that were missing in the country.
04:41He was a man of commitment.
04:47He always said to me, if you think you won't be able to finish something you undertake, it's best not to start it.
04:54When Warsaw fell, Witold Pilecki took off his officer's uniform and dressed down to go underground.
05:08And he had all the right attributes.
05:11He was very athletic. He was an athlete who kept himself very fit.
05:21He moved as quietly as a cat.
05:32When I'd be having dinner with my mother, he'd show up without making a sound.
05:40He'd stand by the door, peek into the kitchen and watch us.
05:43When we realized he was there, we'd jump up and scream, you're a ghost.
05:52In the family, we nicknamed him Ghost.
06:02Pilecki co-created a faction of the Polish resistance that would reach 15,000 members.
06:14They discovered the first uses of Nazi racial theories.
06:24The Reich defined the Slavs as subhumans.
06:31Nazism defined a racial hierarchy that was rather simple.
06:34At the top, you have the pure race, the Germanic race, or what's commonly called the Aryans.
06:43And at the bottom, you have four subhuman groups in the following order.
06:48Slavs, then Asians, followed by Arabs, and lastly, the blacks.
06:57Even lower, the Jews.
06:59While the Jews are subhumans they want to be rid of, it's not known exactly what getting rid of them means.
07:09The Slavs, however, will be used as slaves for the Nazis.
07:21Starting in September 1939, the Nazis launched their intelligence action.
07:26In a matter of months, more than 60,000 people were arrested.
07:35These men all had one thing in common.
07:39They were members of the Polish ruling class.
07:43Pilecki hid to avoid being rounded up.
07:45Starting in September 1939, Heidrich ultimately issues a directive ordering the elimination of the Polish elite.
07:56These people are officers in the Polish army.
08:00They're all sorts of managers and directors, university professors, teachers and priests.
08:04Anyone that could be perceived as belonging to the social structure of the Polish nation.
08:11Meaning not just the Polish themselves, but the Polish Jews and Ukrainians are also targeted.
08:20And they're all eliminated.
08:21I don't think the Nazis were thinking about exterminating all the Slavs.
08:32But they certainly had no intention of allowing them to ever get back on their feet.
08:39And begin rebuilding a nation.
08:44And despite the forced labour and mistreatment, eliminating them is not the goal.
08:50They are not the goal.
08:57On June the 14th, 1940, the Polish prisoners of war were transferred by the Nazis.
09:04They left their overcrowded jails and were taken to a secret location.
09:11To Auschwitz, in German, Auschwitz.
09:15The Polish resistance wanted to know what the occupiers were up to.
09:31And they wanted to free the prisoners.
09:36One man volunteered.
09:39Witold Pilecki.
09:40His mission?
09:43To infiltrate Auschwitz.
09:47I think he felt like it was his responsibility.
09:55He thought he could do it.
10:01With his exceptional skills and his experience,
10:04he was the only one in the resistance who could gather information at Auschwitz.
10:09That's why he made that decision.
10:16When he was in the army, he was trained to be both a spy and a scout.
10:24He was extremely good at anticipating the enemy's movements.
10:27My uncle was also very perceptive.
10:31He knew how to recruit honorable men, incorruptible ones.
10:34Pilecki left behind his wife Maria, and Angers and Sofia, six and seven years old.
10:45He didn't think, oh, I prefer to go to Auschwitz rather than stay home with my family.
10:51No problem.
10:53It must have been a very difficult choice.
10:55But his love for his homeland and the importance of his mission ultimately won out.
10:58He was very religious.
11:03He believed in the power of prayer.
11:08He firmly believed that God would guide him so he could carry out this divine mission.
11:16He was very high.
11:22In order to infiltrate Auschwitz, Pilecki decided to let himself get arrested.
11:27On September the 19th, 1940, he went to see his sister-in-law and nephew, Marek.
11:34Through his network of spies, he knew the Gestapo was going to raid their building that very day.
11:44Jan Kilianski, the caretaker, who was part of the resistance, runs towards us, yelling,
11:51Mr. Witold, the Germans are rounding up the men in our neighborhood.
11:56We have an excellent hiding place in the boiler room.
11:59My uncle told him,
12:01Mr. Jan, thank you, but this time I'm not going to use it.
12:05The caretaker was stupefied.
12:07What's got into him?
12:09What game is he playing?
12:12It was not a game.
12:14It was Pilecki's plan.
12:15He got hauled off along with 1,800 other people, herded onto a train.
12:45Being squashed in there with little air to breathe caused the prisoners to die during the journey.
12:59When they arrived at an unknown place and the freight car doors opened,
13:07the SS were waiting in rows on both sides.
13:10They were holding rifles and whips.
13:14They were German shepherds.
13:23Pilecki was thrown out of the freight car.
13:26With a quick glimpse, a gasp,
13:30he understood that he was not carrying out his mission on earth.
13:34His mission had taken him to hell.
13:40Not only the gun butts of SS men struck our heads.
13:46Something more struck them also.
13:49All our ideas were kicked off in a brutal way.
13:52To which ideas we had been acquainted on the earth.
13:56All that fizzled out.
14:00They tried to strike us most radically.
14:03To break us mentally as soon as possible.
14:06All that was accompanied by laugh and scoffs.
14:09And those pseudo-people, while beating and kicking us, shouted,
14:12Here is KL Auschwitz, mein lieber man.
14:15Pilecki entered Auschwitz with the other men.
14:21They are asked,
14:32What do you do?
14:34Priest?
14:36Killed.
14:37What do you do?
14:38Teacher?
14:40Killed.
14:42What do you do?
14:44Laborer?
14:45Beaten and interned.
14:47Being an officer,
14:50Pilecki understood he was heading straight for death.
14:53To survive, he invented a technical trade for himself.
14:56He received a uniform with blue and white stripes and a red triangle reserved for Pilecki.
14:59He received a uniform with blue and white stripes and a red triangle reserved for Pilecki.
15:01political prisoners, like thousands of his fellow detainees.
15:04Like thousands of his fellow detainees.
15:05Stripped of all their possessions,
15:23and a red triangle reserved for political prisoners,
15:26like thousands of his fellow detainees.
15:33Stripped of all their possessions,
15:35these men were also stripped of their identities.
15:46At Auschwitz, names were forbidden.
15:49The last step needed to dehumanise the prisoners.
15:53From that point on,
15:57Witold Pilecki would be number 4859,
16:01slave to the Reich.
16:09They would give them a number on a little piece of paper.
16:13They had to hold it between their teeth.
16:15But Witold Pilecki held it in his hand.
16:19A guard hit him in the face with a billy club.
16:23It cost him two teeth.
16:25Just two teeth, as he says himself.
16:29The director of the camp, the Lagerfuhrer, made a speech that would seal his fate.
16:43Fritsch, the director of the camp, made a speech.
16:49He told us,
16:51you are in a concentration camp subject to strict discipline.
16:55None of you will leave here alive.
16:57None of you will leave here alive.
16:59The Jews have the right to live 14 days.
17:03The priests, one month.
17:05The others, three months.
17:07They have the right to live 14 days.
17:13Right before his eyes,
17:15Pilecki witnessed the vast Auschwitz project.
17:18Construction work was everywhere, all the time.
17:22It was already the Reich's largest concentration of forced labour camp.
17:26Up to 20,000 men will be held here on the 50-acre site.
17:35The German industrialists hope to use this additional workforce to their advantage.
17:42Himmler will soon declare that Auschwitz is the standard-bearer for the German reconquest of the East.
17:48Companies will set up there.
17:52Enormous growth, be it economic, industrial, agricultural or mining, is everywhere.
18:00There's real work to be done.
18:02And one thing is very important to the SS.
18:05If a prisoner dies, it's not a big deal.
18:07He'll be replaced by the next one to arrive.
18:09At 5.45am, the gong sounded.
18:26Pilecki joined the thousands of other men at the meeting point, all lined up for roll call.
18:39If anyone got out of line, they were beaten furiously by the Capos,
18:43these German common law detainees who were put in charge of the prisoners.
18:53At the beginning, the main job of the SS and the Capos was to kill.
18:57Each Capo had the right to kill a prisoner just because he didn't like him.
19:13He mainly killed the people who didn't work fast enough.
19:19Among these bosses, Ernst Krankermann,
19:23a 45-year-old barber from Berlin, convicted of domestic violence.
19:31He unleashed his rage even on other Capos.
19:38The view of a falling man, kicking or groaning, made Krankermann mad.
19:44He jumped upon his chest, kicked his kidneys, sexual organs,
19:49did him away as quickly as he could.
19:59Those who escaped Krankermann's fury ran to join a work commando.
20:07And like most of the prisoners, Pilecki was assigned to a construction unit at Auschwitz.
20:12At that time, the prisoners worked mainly on expanding the camp by building new blocks
20:23and adding floors to the one-story buildings.
20:30When I was 18 years old, I had to carry bags of cement from the train that weighed 50 kilos.
20:34When a man would fall over from the weight of the sack, and many couldn't take it, the SS shot him on the spot.
20:45They would say that the man was no longer fit to live and work at the camp.
20:48It was in such moments of killing another prisoner, when you, like a real animal, stood for several minutes,
21:01took breath into your widely moving lungs, somewhat balanced the pace of your thumping heart.
21:06Worn out after 16 hours of labor, Pilecki and the other prisoners returned to the camp.
21:20Escorted by the SS, they carried the bodies of their dead comrades who had died while working.
21:26At Auschwitz, even the dead were expected at the evening roll call.
21:30If the capos left for work in the morning with 100 men, and came back at the end of the day with 100 men,
21:41the SS thought they hadn't done their work properly.
21:52But if they came back with 90 men, that meant they were good capos.
22:00Pilecki staggered to return to his block before curfew.
22:11Each building housed up to 1,200 prisoners,
22:15who were piled up on the floor for months, and later in the beds they had built.
22:23There were several men for each level.
22:25The living shared their beds with the dying.
22:33You saw a prolonged agony of your friend.
22:37You were dying with him together.
22:39You ceased your existence together with him.
22:43Yet you got revived, regenerated, transformed.
22:47But if it happens not once, but let's say 90 times, it cannot be helped.
22:55You become someone else than you were on the earth.
22:57The living conditions were terribly unsanitary.
23:12It would take years before toilets were installed.
23:15Along with water troughs, so the prisoners could quickly wash themselves.
23:19Typhus, dysentery, disease spreads like wildfire.
23:30Pilecki barely managed to survive a pulmonary infection.
23:36Undernourished and ill, the prisoners grew ever weaker.
23:40In the morning, you got half a litre of some liquid, which they called either coffee or tea.
23:49But it was some substitute.
23:53At noontime, we did get a litre of soup.
24:01And in the evening, we received one third of a loaf of bread.
24:14The bread decided who lived and who died.
24:17In the camps, stealing bread was punishable by death,
24:21by either the camp directors or the prisoners themselves.
24:24In the camps, the men became skeletal shadows of their former selves, too weak to work,
24:34too exhausted to eat, too worn out to live.
24:43One thought was felt.
24:46We were all united by our rage, our desire of revenge.
24:49Now I felt myself to be in an environment perfectly ready to start my job.
24:56And I discovered in me a substitute of joy.
25:01So I did not get in despair.
25:04You had to fight with great effort for survival.
25:11Pilecki created his resistance network, the ZOW.
25:15His battle plan was already established.
25:20He had to create a network of reliable men who would infiltrate all the commandos
25:25and then report back on what was happening inside Auschwitz to the Polish resistance and the Allies.
25:32He hoped to spark a mutiny to liberate the camp when Warsaw gave the sign.
25:45Behind the blocks on Birkenalli Street, Pilecki began recruiting.
25:54Each time he revealed himself to another prisoner, he was putting his life at risk.
25:59Pilecki was assigned to different work commandos at Auschwitz.
26:13And when he was working in these commandos, he would carefully observe the other prisoners.
26:17When he felt he could trust one of them, Vytold Pilecki would suggest that he join his underground organization.
26:35He very carefully chose those who would join him.
26:37His ZOW was composed of cells of five men.
26:46Each member then had to recruit five new men.
26:54With this system, many people escaped arrest and it prevented the Nazis from infiltrating us.
27:00If the Gestapo made arrests or if someone betrayed the group, only five men would be lost.
27:13Kitchens, stables, woodwork shops.
27:18Pilecki's organization infiltrated the commandos one after the other.
27:22Although they were prisoners themselves, they were chosen as our butchers.
27:31We as organization decided to get use of it.
27:34It made most sense to recruit into our organization men who held positions of authority.
27:38A room warden who had sworn an oath could give second meals to those extremely exhausted.
27:44We could also send him comrades knowing he would let them rest in the room.
27:52Pilecki understood that to survive in the camp, working in the least taxing commandos was a must.
28:02To protect his men, he approached the head of the labor department, Otto Kuzil, 31 years old.
28:11Even though prisoner number two was a German capo.
28:16Purse snatching in Berlin landed him in camp after camp,
28:20until he was ultimately sent to Auschwitz.
28:24He loathed the Nazis.
28:35He knew that he couldn't help the older prisoners.
28:42But it was possible to save the younger ones, 20 or 25 years old.
28:46He could help them survive at Auschwitz.
28:59I weighed only 40 kilos.
29:03Otto Kuzil saw me and said,
29:04Hey you, number 918, go work in that commando.
29:14And I discovered that that group was working under a roof.
29:21Thankfully, that's how, little by little, I got my strength back.
29:25Next, Pilecki took on the camp hospital.
29:38He instructed Dr. Władysław Dering, a member of the resistance, to infiltrate it.
29:43Dr. Władysław Dering stole medicine reserved for the SS, and fudged the intake and release records,
29:53to protect the weakest prisoners.
30:00One of the men who was saved by the resistance, was Kazimierz Pichowski.
30:04When I was sick, a Polish prisoner came to see me.
30:17He saw me and told me to go back to the block,
30:20because the Obersturmführer was coming back to the hospital the next day.
30:25And that, they usually cleaned out the hospital after each of his visits.
30:29That meant they were going to kill the prisoners who were in bad shape.
30:42Pilecki's network gradually reached several dozen men.
30:47And the Germans started getting suspicious.
30:54They noticed things had been stolen from their offices.
30:57They were surprised that some prisoners had lived longer than planned.
31:01The Gestapo had Pilecki and his men in its sights.
31:09In front of block 15, a rat trap appeared.
31:13The Gestapo promised to reward any prisoner who ratted out his comrades.
31:19The camp was a gauge which tested human characters.
31:22Some of us slide into a moral sewer.
31:28Others got their characters cut like crystal.
31:33Pilecki started a battle of messages.
31:41Pilecki's organization made a copy of the key to the letterbox.
31:44The conspirators opened it, read the claims, and threw away the ones that put other prisoners in danger.
31:55To neutralize the rats, the network set up its own underground tribunal.
32:01While the Nazis were killing indiscriminately by day, the traitors were being judged by night.
32:07The prisoners tried to eliminate the most dangerous men, the rats, the ones who make threats, the most violent capos.
32:21Whenever possible, they deal with them when it's not dangerous to do so, when they can get rid of the body.
32:26These decisions were never taken lightly.
32:37They thought about them for a long time.
32:40The members of the network debated amongst themselves.
32:45A lot of evidence against the prisoner was necessary to sentence him.
32:56In the middle of a typhus outbreak, Pilecki's men picked lice off the sick and put them in their target's clothes.
33:10The infested capos, traitors and SS were sent to the hospital where Daring and his men awaited them.
33:16These eliminations, overdoses or no treatment at all, left no trace whatsoever for the Gestapo who reacted by strengthening their efforts to destroy Pilecki's network.
33:32They interrogated the resistance at the prison camp in Block 11, nicknamed the Death Block.
33:38Passing that place, you smelled an odour like in a butchery.
33:47Red stream was running along in a little gutter.
33:52The small gutter was repeatedly whitewashed, but nearly every day the stream was meandering again among the white banks.
34:00Behind the gates usually kept closed, the resistance who had been arrested joined those who'd been sentenced to death.
34:17The SS Hauptführer, Gerhard Palic, was waiting for them.
34:21Nicknamed the butcher by the prisoners, he boasted about having personally executed 25,000 prisoners at the wall of death.
34:32He would go to the Block 11 with a silencer, a small rifle, he would place that rifle right at that spot
34:44and pull the trigger and the man right away. The blood burst through eyes and mouth and nose and everything and he fell dead immediately.
34:58And at one point, he killed that way over 350 people.
35:04Kasimir Spichovsky loaded the bodies onto a cart to take them to the crematorium.
35:18He also counted the exact number of dead men, because Paletsky was preparing the second phase of his project.
35:26To tell the resistance and the free world about the actual crimes being committed at Auschwitz.
35:34First and foremost, each group of five had to observe what was going on around them.
35:48Our mission was to gather as many details as possible about Auschwitz.
35:57We had to give the information to the leader of our group, who would then give it to Paletsky.
36:04And then he compiled it all into his report for London.
36:12In November of 1940, Paletsky figured out how to contact the outside world.
36:20He gave his report to a prisoner from an influential family who had been freed.
36:24He memorised the report. When he arrived in Warsaw, the man recited it to the resistance,
36:32which then sent it off to London. It was the first report on the camp.
36:38Paletsky lifted the veil on Auschwitz and sent a request to the Allies.
36:43Bomb the camp's infrastructures.
36:45The bombing would have killed as many SS as possible and destroyed the camp enclosures.
36:57And the prisoners could have tried to escape through the gaps and the fences.
37:03It's not possible to bomb in 41, nor in 42 or 43.
37:08Only in 44 do the Allies have the means to reach Auschwitz. So that's the first point.
37:15The second is, what to bomb? Bomb the camps? You're going to kill the prisoners.
37:23So that makes no sense at all. So in that vein, bombing Auschwitz amounts to killing people
37:30who are already victims of the Nazis.
37:37The report closed with this sentence. No one will die in vain if it means the end of Auschwitz.
37:46But on January the 15th, 1941, the British rejected the idea. The news would never reach Paletsky.
37:54Back at Auschwitz, Paletsky watched the death machine accelerate before his eyes.
38:05A few months after the German invasion of the USSR, 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived at the camp.
38:14The rest was being done away by excessive effort at work, by beating, hunger and frost.
38:20Sometimes the prisoners were kept in underwear or stark naked outside the block for hours in the frost.
38:28The Germans laughed that people of Siberia should not fear any cold.
38:33We heard the screams of people being frozen to death.
38:41The Soviet prisoners prepared to become the subject of a Nazi experiment.
38:45Killing someone is traumatic. So they're going to try to find a way to break the connection
38:53between the victim and the executioner, to protect the executioner.
39:00On September the 3rd, 1941, Paletsky learned that 600 Soviet officers and 250 Poles were being taken to block 11.
39:09The Nazis released gas into the cells through the windows.
39:18Then they carefully observed what happened.
39:22If the quantity of gas was too low, they increased the amounts.
39:27That was the first of the massacres committed at Auschwitz with Zyklon B.
39:31Then, one day in November, Paletsky noticed several hundred Soviets, naked,
39:43being pushed towards the morgue and the cremation ovens.
39:46I was struck by the view which then terrified me.
39:58The man could be naive until his death.
40:01I understood in that time it was intended to give underwear and clothes to those prisoners of war,
40:06but why they assigned the premises of the crematorium.
40:11Though it turned out that they had been driven there just to save time.
40:16They were locked up.
40:24From the above, a can of gas was dropped.
40:30And the trembling bodies were pushed half-conscious into an incandescent grate.
40:46These gassings were an experiment, but they were still part of the plan to conduct mass murders,
41:02because it is right about this time that they are testing the use of gas trucks on the Jews in Serbia,
41:09and that they are getting ready to open the first extermination camp.
41:16So, from that point on, the gassings will be used to eliminate certain types of prisoners
41:21by means of certain policies, such as the 14F-13,
41:26to eliminate prisoners who are unfit to work,
41:28or the 14F-14, which was the codename for the elimination of certain members of the Red Army,
41:34in other words, the Soviet soldiers.
41:35In March 1942, Auschwitz expanded even more.
41:50Birkenau appeared out of nowhere.
41:53Four times more vast than the main camp,
41:56this new concentration camp could house a hundred and twenty-five thousand prisoners.
42:12About 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war will be taken to Birkenau,
42:27and they will be the ones who,
42:31in terrifying conditions, will begin building Birkenau,
42:37which is designed to be a camp for prisoners of war.
42:42A stalag for Soviet prisoners of war.
42:48That was the first purpose of Birkenau.
42:53But starting in May of 1942,
42:56Birkenau, the concentration camp, also became an extermination camp.
43:05The Nazis would industrialise the planned systematic slaughter
43:09of 900,000 Jewish men, women and children.
43:18As agreed at the Van Zee conference on January 20th, 1942,
43:23they implemented the final solution.
43:28In the wake of Van Zee, they will decide to deport Jews from all across Europe,
43:39with the idea being, even if it was not yet completely thought out, that they must all die.
43:47The killing machine had only just started.
44:01Auschwitz was one thing,
44:03but Birkenau was a massive machine,
44:10where people were massacred, gassed.
44:12At the main concentration camp,
44:23Piletsky learned of what was taking place at Birkenau.
44:27His fellow resistant, Jan Karch, had been transferred there.
44:31He gave him all the information he would need for a new report that escaped prisoners would bring to London.
44:36Piletsky is the first person to really get the word out about the massacre of Jews at Auschwitz.
44:49He understands that two miles from Stamlager, in other words, at Birkenau,
44:55the mass murder of Jews is being set up.
44:57There were many women and children in the vans.
45:06Sometimes, there were children in cradles.
45:09Here, all of them were to end their lives collectively.
45:13They were carried like a herd of animals to be slaughtered.
45:21Women with children separately, men separately.
45:24They went into huts, which supposedly were baths, while they were gas chambers.
45:37On the basis of the information that Piletsky reveals,
45:40in late 1942, the Polish government in exile will publish a booklet that relates the fate of the Jews
45:48and the mass murder of Jews on Polish territory.
45:50Of course, Piletsky, like practically all the prisoners,
45:58was convinced that this news was of the highest importance.
46:05They thought that essentially the entire Polish resistance,
46:08the government in exile, and the allied countries would deal with it extremely carefully.
46:14They thought that liberating the prisoners,
46:22or at least improving their faith, would finally become a priority for the allies.
46:28They thought that they would do their lives, or improve their lives in any way.
46:34Confronted with this vast human tragedy, Piletsky hoped to launch the last phase of his plan.
46:41A mutiny at the main camp.
46:45Combining an attack on the ground by the Polish resistance with a bombardment by the British,
46:50he thought he would take out the SS and liberate Auschwitz.
46:54A mutiny at the same time.
46:55A mutiny at the same time.
46:57A mutiny at the same time.
46:57For several months, we were able to seize the camp almost any day.
47:02We were waiting for an order.
47:05As we understood that without such one,
47:08although it would be a beautiful firework and unexpected for the world,
47:12and for Poland, we could not agree to that.
47:14Our messages went there with an instruction that they should be delivered to the supreme commander.
47:21But the temptation haunted every day.
47:28The free world remained silent while the Nazi killing machine ran relentlessly at full speed.
47:34Reading Piletsky's reports and the writings of many former prisoners,
47:48you really get a sense of just how terribly disappointed they were.
47:53All that information had made it to Warsaw and to the Allies, and nothing was done.
47:58All that information had made it to be done.
48:02Piletsky came up with a crazy idea.
48:04Perhaps he himself could convince the Polish resistance and the Allies.
48:09But to do that, he had to escape from Auschwitz.
48:16In 1942, out of 170 attempted escapes, only a dozen were successful.
48:24But Piletsky, as always, believed his lucky star would guide him.
48:28It was the perfect place, located two miles from the main camp.
48:45On April the 26th, in the dead of night, Piletsky's plan came to life.
48:50At 6.30 pm, Piletsky and his accomplices leave for work with the night shift.
49:00They were assigned to a workshop where they made the bread for the prisoners.
49:04They had a copy of the key to the back door of the bakery.
49:17But nothing went as planned.
49:19First of all, the guards were replaced.
49:25Piletsky thought they'd be dealing with a group of older SS who liked to fall asleep right after dinner.
49:33But they were replaced with young guards who were very much awake and alert.
49:37Then, the key they had didn't work.
49:43The door wouldn't open.
49:46As far as I was concerned, the tension of my nerves was redoubled, yet the door seemed stronger than us.
49:54Suddenly, abruptly and noiselessly, it came open before us.
49:58A chill wind flowed upon our flushed heads.
50:01Stars began to shine in the sky, as if they winked to us.
50:05A jump into a dark space and run in the sequence.
50:09Yasek, me, Edek.
50:11In the same time, shots were fired behind us.
50:14How fast we were running, it's hard to describe.
50:17The bullets did not touch us.
50:20We were tearing the air into rags by quick movements of our hands.
50:28After 947 days of detention at Auschwitz, Piletsky regained his freedom, along with his two comrades.
50:47The Germans would never succeed in nabbing the three escapees.
50:50After the escape, Piletsky contacted the resistance units.
51:03These units were hidden in the forest around Auschwitz.
51:10They needed the support of the Armia Krajowa, the home army, the Polish resistance.
51:14This support never came.
51:21Piletsky realized that the most important thing he must do
51:25is write his report to recount what he saw and what he went through.
51:32Piletsky wanted to use this last report to finish his account.
51:38He once again took up arms to fight the Reich.
51:41In 1944, he participated in the Warsaw Uprising.
51:48But the Iron Curtain crashed down on Poland.
51:52Piletsky's dream of a free and democratic country crumbled before his eyes.
51:59Once again, he refused to flee.
52:03Having finished with the Nazis, he joined the resistance against the Soviets until May 8, 1947.
52:11He was arrested by the Communists, Piletsky was tortured over 150 times.
52:19He was executed for high treason.
52:22His name banned from the history books.
52:27Only in 1990 did Vitol Piletsky finally reappear,
52:32resurrected and recognized as a hero of World War II,
52:37as the man who infiltrated Auschwitz.
52:50He was arrested and accused of not allowed.
52:51He was executed for high treason.
52:52He was convicted for high treason.
52:54He was convicted for high treason.
52:54But he was convicted for high treason.
52:55The Roman king was founded by the translation.
52:57He was convicted of lying in the memory of
53:08the retreat of the Nazis.
53:10He was convicted of sin.
53:11The Roman king was in the military.
53:12He was convicted of jornal man.