Was it Really a Blind Fate? Interwoven Lives of Witold Pilecki and Tomasz Serafiński and the Daring Efforts of Ludmiła Serafińska to Save Them Both

Abstract

The riveting and richly illustrated paper about fateful events that brought together three courageous Poles, officers of the Polish underground, fighting Nazis and trying desperately to stop atrocities being committed at Auschwitz. The main character of the story is Witold Pilecki, an officer of the Polish underground who volunteered for the underground mission to infiltrate the Nazi concentration camps and provide reports about these camps. He allowed himself to be captured by the Nazis in one of the many round-ups of the Polish civilian populations and spent three years in Auschwitz, organizing resistance and smuggling our short reports about the atrocities being committed there. Pilecki finally managed to escape in early 1943 and was in urgent need of hiding. He found such hiding at the home of Tomasz and Ludmila Serafinski, known as Koryznowka. Tomasz and Ludmila, husband and wife, both were officers of the Polish underground. They hid Pilecki for over three months in their home, helped him to evade the Nazis, allowed him to recover his strength and to write his first comprehensive reports which were smuggled to London and Washington. All three became close friends. In an unusual twist, Pilecki, when he volunteered for his mission, Pilecki assumed a false identity and passed himself as “Tomasz Serfinski”. As it happened, both man fought German invasion of Poland and were defending Warsaw in 1939, where wounded Serafinski lost his identity documents. Pilecki found them and assuming that Serafinski died, took Serafinski’ s name and identity and was imprisoned in Auschwitz as “Tomasz Serafinski.” By sheer accident, Serafinski was the commanding officer of the underground post near the escape route of Pilecki and that is how the two men finally met. At the end, all of these heroic people, paid a very heavy price for their courageous actions.