Docudrama cast on man who volunteered for Auschwitz

Witold Pilecki. Photo: wikipedia

Director Miroslaw Krzyszkowski has revealed that the film will draw extensively on interviews with Pilecki's descendents.

“We would like to make a film that presents him in the context of the family he grew up in,” he said, stressing that it was this “that shaped him as a man, a citizen and a soldier.”

Pilecki volunteered to take part in an intelligence-gathering mission in Auschwitz for the Polish underground, deliberately getting himself arrested in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in September 1940.

After being thrown into the camp, he organised a resistance network among the inmates, set up a clandestine radio station, and then escaped in 1943.

As early as March 1941, intelligence reports by Pilecki had been smuggled to the Polish government-in-exile in London, and the material then reached Poland's western allies, providing unique material on the Holocaust.

Actor Marcin Kwasny, who has been cast in the main role, has said that Pilecki was “an exceptional figure in every way - a patriot with a big P.”

With the Red Army occupying Poland at the close of World War II, Pilecki was asked to continue gathering intelligence by General Wladyslaw Anders.

However, he was eventually unmasked, and following a communist show trial, he was executed in 1948.

A state-backed bid to find his final resting place is ongoing.

Director Krzyszkowski managed to raise most of his budget through private donations, with about 1500 donors backing the project. (nh)

Source: PAP