On Friday, 28 January Polish Institute in Vienna held a meeting devoted to Captain Witold Pilecki. Prof. Timothy Snyder (Yale University & Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna) and Dr. Paweł Kosiński (Branch of the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw) gave lectures about the hero and later a panel discussion was held, led by Prof. Philipp Ther (University of Vienna). The audience eagerly joined the discussion of the historians.

It is an unusual life story: the struggle of a Pole against two inhuman systems, which in the past century wreaked havoc not only in Poland. Witold Pilecki, born in 1901, continued the fight against the Nazis also after the September 1939 campaign. He voluntarily entered the Auschwitz concentration camp, from where he passed intelligence information and organized resistance. However, the reports, which have recently been translated and published in German, have not led to the intended reaction of the Allies.

Pilecki managed to escape from the camp. After the war he fought on for independence of Poland, this time with the Communist regime. With a court sentence he has been sentenced to death by a firing squad on 25 May 1948. It is no wonder, that only after 1989 Pilecki's story became present in the public discourse in Poland.

http://www.polnisches-institut.at/
https://www.facebook.com/PolnischesInstitutWien