T H E E N D C O M M U N E

The Auschwitz Volunteer

During World War II, Witold Pilecki enrolled for a Polish resistance mission that involved being voluntarily imprisoned in the Auschwitz death camp in order to gather intelligence and later escape. While in the camp, after surviving severe pneumonia and routine torturous beatings and other forms of degradation so commonplace in a world war II-era concentration camp, he organized a resistance movement and, as early as 1941, informed the Western Allies of Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz atrocities. He escaped from the camp in 1943 after nearly two and a half years of imprisonment by overpowering a guard with the help of other inmates, while also cutting phone lines in other to secure escape. After Auschwitz, Pilecki took part in the Warsaw Uprising in August-October, 1944. After the war, the Soviets put him in prison for his resistance activities since his allegiance was with the Polish Home Army—an underground resistance army that also fought the Soviet occupants.

Witold Pilecki is the foremost modern embodiment of the archetypal hero myth.

            Gilgamesh, Herakles, Pilecki.