A discussion led by historian, Prof. Timothy Snyder from Yale University, author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, and frequent contributor to many publications including the New York Review of Books and the New York Times. Snyder will join Museum Director David G. Marwell in conversation with publisher Terry Tegnazian from Aquila Polonica.
Witold Pilecki, a Captain in the Polish Home Army during the Second World War, a man with a wife and two children, volunteered to be captured in 1940 by German officers and taken to Auschwitz, from which he would smuggle out intelligence about conditions inside the camp, create a resistance organization among the prisoners, and plan to foment a rebellion and an escape with the assistance of the Home Army and allied forces. He survived to escape in 1943, heroically held up a German panzer troop for two weeks during the Warsaw Rising of 1944, and was taken prisoner of war by the Nazis. After the war, he returned to Poland as a spy for the Polish Government-in-Exile in support of anti-Communist organizations, and was eventually arrested by the Communists, tortured, tried, and executed as a traitor in 1948, to be rehabilitated as a hero only in the 1990s after the fall of Communism in Poland.
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