One man's daring mission to infiltrate Auschwitz revealed its atrocities to the world – this is his story.
On 27 January 1945, prisoners at the main camp of Auschwitz watched as the soldiers of the First Ukrainian Front came and opened the gates under the mocking words of "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Makes Freedom"). After more than four years of terror, they were finally being set free.
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the most notorious war-time concentration camp in the world, where more 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered on these grounds.
Auschwitz was established in 1940 when Nazi Germany opened a new camp complex in Oświęcim in southern Poland to hold prisoners. What began as a political prison of Polish nationals evolved into a death factory of Europe's Jews, and the name Auschwitz would soon become synonymous with genocide and the Holocaust. During its first year of operation, little was known about the camp's activities, until one man decided to risk his life to find out.
To the guards and other prisoners, this man was Tomasz Serafiński, prisoner number 4859, a Jew who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But to a small group of an underground resistance group against Nazi Germany, his name was Witold Pilecki, second lieutenant in the army, an intelligence agent, a husband and father to two children and a Catholic.
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