September 19th, 1940, Warsaw.
A 39-year-old Polish cavalry officer named Vitold Pitky stands on a street corner during a German roundup.
He watches soldiers seize innocent civilians.
Most try to hide.
Pletky steps forward.
He is captured and detained.
2 days later, transported to a place the Polish resistance knows little about, Ashvitz concentration camp.
There, he becomes prisoner number 4,859.
But Pitky isn’t trying to survive.
He’s trying to infiltrate.
His mission is to gather intelligence and build a resistance network inside the camp itself to warn the world.
For the next 947 days, Pitky will live inside Avitz while secretly documenting everything.
Then in April 1943, he’ll do something even more remarkable.
He’ll escape, and the intelligence he gathered will become some of the earliest detailed evidence of what was happening inside the camps.
This is the story of the only man known to volunteer for Achvitz.
Bold Pitky was born May 13th, 1901 in Olian Empire where his Polish family lived in exile.
His parents were patriots who instilled in him a deep love for Poland, a country that at the time didn’t exist on maps, divided between Russia, Austria, and Prussia.
After World War I, when Poland regained independence, Pitky joined the Polish military and fought in the Polish Soviet War of 1919 to 1921.
He participated in the Battle of Warsaw, where Polish forces stopped the Soviet advance into Europe.
After the war, he settled in Lea, a city that was then part of Poland and is now within Bellarus.
Pitky married Maria Ostroska, a school teacher in 1931.
They had two children.
He ran the family farm, painted, and wrote poetry.
It was a quiet, productive life.
Then came September 1st, 1939.
German forces invaded Poland from the west.
17 days later, Soviet forces invaded from the east.
Poland, caught between two totalitarian powers, was crushed in weeks.
Pletky was called up and fought with his cavalry unit during the invasion.
When organized resistance collapsed in October 1939, he refused to surrender.
He made his way to Warsaw and joined the underground resistance.
In November 1939, Pitky and Major Jan Wardakovich founded a resistance organization called the Secret Polish Army.
Pitky became its chief of staff.
The organization quickly grew, recruiting hundreds of members in Warsaw.
In June 1940, the Germans opened a concentration camp at Ovenim Avitz in German in converted Polish army barracks.
The first transport arrived with Polish political prisoners.
More transports followed from Warsaw in August 1940.
Then something troubling began happening.
Families received telegrams informing them their imprisoned relatives had died.
Too many deaths too quickly.
The Polish underground grew suspicious.
What was happening inside Avitz? At the time, little was known.
It appeared to be a prison camp for Polish political opponents, criminals, and resistance fighters.
But why were so many dying so fast? The resistance needed intelligence from inside.
They needed someone to infiltrate the camp, organize prisoners, and report back.
But how? You couldn’t simply walk into Avitz.
You had to be arrested and sent there.
In August 1940, Major Vodakovich called a meeting of his officers.
He looked at Pitky and proposed the idea.
Someone needed to volunteer to be deliberately captured and sent to Avitz.
Pletky understood immediately.
This was dangerous.
Once inside, there was no guarantee of escape.
The camp was designed to hold and break prisoners.
Many didn’t survive the first months.
He had a wife and two young children.
If he went, he might never see them again.
But Pletky also understood that without intelligence from inside, the resistance couldn’t help the prisoners or understand what the Germans were doing.
Someone had to go.
He raised his hand.
He would do it.
His superiors approved the plan and provided him with false identity documents in the name of Thomas Saraphinsky, allegedly a Tanner by profession, born in Warsaw in 1902.
On September 19th, 1940, Pitky positioned himself on a Warsaw Street where German roundups were taking place.
These were random mass arrests where soldiers would cordon off a street and seize everyone present.
The captives were used as forced to labor or sent to camps.
Pletky could have hidden.
His sister-in-law, Eleanor Ostraka, had a safe hiding place in her apartment, but hiding wasn’t the mission.
When German soldiers swept through, Pitky didn’t run.
He was seized along with approximately 2,000 other Poles.
They were held for 2 days at the Lighor Guards barracks in Warsaw.
Prisoners were beaten with rubber batons.
Many were injured.
Then on the night of September 21st to 22nd, 1,75 prisoners were loaded onto trains.
Destination: Avitz.
Pitky arrived at Ashvitz on September 22nd, 1940.
He was registered as prisoner 4,859.
Camp authorities photographed him from three angles.
His shaved head, high forehead, and serious expression captured forever in the prison records.
Conditions were immediately brutal.
Prisoners faced backbreaking labor, starvation rations, constant beatings, and arbitrary executions.
The average life expectancy for a prisoner was 42 days.
Pitky would survive 947 days.
He worked in the fields during early winter without proper clothing, just wooden clogs, no hat, no socks.
Later, he worked insulating the crematorium, a grim task that exposed him daily to the evidence of systematic killing.
Within weeks, Pitky began carefully identifying trustworthy prisoners.
He needed people with courage, discipline, and loyalty, men who could keep secrets, even under torture.
He found them among Polish military officers, resistance fighters, and strong willed civilians.
By late 1940, Pitky had established the core of what would become the Union of Military Organizations.
The network grew slowly, deliberately.
Members operated in small cells.
If one cell was discovered, others remained safe.
The organization had multiple missions.
First, boost morale.
Prisoners needed hope.
The members smuggled in news from outside, shared food and medicine, and reminded each other why they were enduring this.
Second, prepare for potential liberation.
Pitky believed, perhaps optimistically, that Allied forces or the Polish resistance might eventually assault Avitz from outside.
If that happened, the Union would coordinate a prisoner uprising from within.
They stockpiled small weapons and planned tactics.
Third, and most crucial, gather intelligence and smuggle it out.
This was Pitky’s primary mission, and it was extraordinarily dangerous.
Camp authorities watched for any sign of organized resistance.
Discovery meant torture and execution, but Pitky found ways.
Some prisoners were released after serving sentences.
The union identified trusted individuals pending release and gave them verbal reports to memorize.
Others smuggled out written messages hidden in clothing or personal items.
The first report reached Warsaw in October 1940, just weeks after Pitky’s arrival.
A young Polish officer named Alexander Wiperolski memorized Pitky’s account of camp conditions and delivered it orally to resistance headquarters.
The report detailed systematic abuse, starvation, disease, and routine executions.
It described the camp’s layout, guard rotations, and the locations of weapon storage.
It was among the first concrete intelligence the resistance had received about Awitz operations.
From March 1941 onward, Pitky’s reports were forwarded through the Polish government in exile in London to British authorities and the Allied governments.
These reports provided early detailed evidence of what was happening inside the German camp system.
Pitky documented everything he witnessed.
the arrival of Soviet prisoners of war and their systematic execution, the construction of the gas chambers, the expanding role of Avitz in the final solution, the organized murder of European Jews, the medical experiments, the daily brutality that ground prisoners down.
His reports were clear, factual, and devastating.
He estimated cremation capacities.
He documented the construction of additional facilities.
He noted the changing demographics as more Jewish prisoners arrived and were immediately sent to their deaths.
The intelligence network functioned for over 2 years, sending regular updates to Warsaw.
It was one of the most successful espionage operations of the war, conducted from inside a concentration camp by a prisoner with no official support or resources.
But by early 1943, the situation was deteriorating.
The German security service, the Gestapo, had intensified efforts to identify resistance members.
Several members of the union were caught, tortured, and executed.
The network was compromised.
Pitky faced a choice.
Stay and risk the entire organization’s exposure or escape and personally deliver his most critical intelligence to resistance leadership in Warsaw.
On the night of April 26th to 27th, 1943, Pletky made his move.
He’d been transferred to a bakery located 2 mi outside the main camp.
Security was lighter there.
With two fellow prisoners, Pitky executed a carefully planned escape.
They cut telephone and alarm wires.
Overpowered a guard, used a duplicate key to unlock the front door and ran.
Shots were fired behind us.
Pitky later wrote, “How fast we were running, it’s hard to describe.
We were tearing the air into rags by quick movements of our hands.
They escaped into the Polish countryside and made contact with resistance forces.
Pletky had survived 947 days inside Avitz.
He’d accomplished his mission.
Now he needed to convince the resistance leadership to act.
Pletky returned to Warsaw and immediately began writing his report.
He believed an assault on Avitz was still possible.
Allied aircraft could drop weapons.
The home army could attack from outside.
Union prisoners could revolt from within.
Together they could liberate the camp.
But the resistance leadership rejected the plan.
They considered it too risky.
The allies, when informed of Pitky’s detailed reports, were skeptical.
Some dismissed his accounts as exaggerated.
The scale of industrial murder he described seemed impossible to believe.
Pitky was devastated.
He’d risked everything to gather information about Achvitz, and the world wasn’t responding.
No assault came, no liberation.
The camp continued operating until Soviet forces finally reached it in January 1945.
After his escape, Pletky didn’t stop fighting.
In August 1944, when the Warsaw uprising erupted against German occupation, Pletky volunteered immediately.
He fought for 63 days as the resistance attempted to liberate Warsaw before Soviet forces arrived.
The uprising failed.
German forces crushed it brutally.
Pletki was captured again and spent the war’s final months in German P camps.
He was liberated by American forces in April 1945.
After liberation, Pletki joined the Polish second corps in Italy.
There he wrote his most comprehensive report on Avitz, a detailed 100page document that would eventually become the book the Avitz Volunteer.
But Poland wasn’t free.
German occupation had ended, but Soviet control began.
The Polish government in exile was replaced by a communist regime loyal to Moscow.
For Pitky and many resistance fighters, one occupation had simply replaced another.
In December 1945, Pitky made a fateful decision.
He returned to Poland under a false name to gather intelligence on the communist government.
He documented Soviet control, falsified elections, and the suppression of genuine Polish independence.
His cover didn’t last.
In May 1947, communist authorities arrested him.
He was charged with espionage and planning assassinations, charges later admitted to be fabricated.
For months, Pitky endured interrogation and torture.
The man who’d survived Avitz was broken by his own countrymen.
In March 1948, a show trial convicted him.
The verdict was predetermined.
On May 25th, 1948, Vittold Pilitki was executed with a shot to the back of the head in Mocktov Prison, Warsaw.
He was 47 years old.
His body was buried in an unmarked grave.
His family wasn’t notified.
For decades, communist authorities suppressed his story.
His reports were hidden.
His name was forbidden.
He became officially a traitor and spy.
Only after communism fell in 1989 did Pitky’s story reemerge.
In 1990, the Polish government formally exonerated him.
His military rank was restored postuously.
His decorations stripped by the communist regime were returned to his family.
In 2000, historian Adam Tira published the first comprehensive Polish biography.
In 2012, Pitky’s Avitz report was translated into English and published as the Avitz volunteer beyond bravery.
The book revealed the full extent of his mission and sacrifice.
Today, schools, streets, and institutions across Poland bear Pitky’s name.
The Pitky Institute in Berlin maintains a permanent exhibition on his life.
His story is taught in Polish schools as an example of extraordinary courage and sacrifice.
Vold Pitky volunteered for a mission that should have killed him.
He survived nearly 3 years inside Avitz while organizing resistance and documenting systematic murder.
He escaped.
He fought in the Warsaw uprising.
He survived German P camps.
and then his own government executed him as a traitor.
But his reports survived.
His testimony helped document what happened inside the camps.
His intelligence, though not acted upon quickly enough, contributed to the historical record.
And his example of moral courage, volunteering for Achvitz when no one was forced to, stands as one of the most remarkable acts of the 20th century.
As Pitky once wrote in his report, “I’ve tried to live my life so that in my last hour I’ll be happy rather than afraid.” He kept that promise.
