The Polish Catholic Who Sneaked into Auschwitz to Warn an Indifferent World

A member of the Polish resistance to the Nazis, Witold Pilecki became aware that something terrible was occurring at Auschwitz, and so smuggled himself in and out of the camp, bringing back detailed descriptions of its murderous purpose. Reviewing The Volunteer, Jack Fairweather’s recent biography of Pilecki, Caroline Moorehead writes:

Between September 1941, [when he first got to Auschwitz], and April 1943, when he escaped in order to convey himself the news of what was happening, Pilecki, who as a Polish prisoner was employed in a variety of laboring jobs, sent out report after report via couriers, other brave men who often died for their efforts. Full of statistics, they detailed the number of deaths, as well as facts about the arrival of Jewish families, the trains, the typhus, the starvation, the crematorium, and the gas chambers, though it took Pilecki a long time to comprehend that Auschwitz was in fact the epicenter for the Nazi program of extermination.

These reports, received by the Warsaw underground and gotten out to London and Washington, were for the most part dismissed as rumors. Whether bombing the camp (something Pilecki urged, on the grounds that it might, at the very least, give a number of prisoners a chance to escape) would in fact have changed anything is hard to say, and the Allies were in any case hard-pressed militarily. But as Fairweather shows, there was no desire to believe [reports], particularly as the horrific killings were often watered down in the telling.

“Poles,” observed one man at the [British] foreign office, “are being very irritating over this.” An American official spoke of the documentation as being “too Semitic.”

Pilecki spent the remainder of the war fighting the Germans—a fact that made him suspect in the eyes of the postwar Communist regime in Poland, which murdered him in 1948.

Read more at Spectator

More about: Auschwitz, Communism, Holocaust, Poland, Righteous Among the Nations

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF