The Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2020

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

In 1940 the Polish resistance decided it needed to send an agent to Auschwitz concentration camp. They were desperate to find out what was going on in a place that even by that stage of the war had an evil reputation. Historian Jack Fairweather tells the story of Witold Pilecki the Pole who volunteered for the job. He smuggled out first accounts of the camp to the rest of the world. He chronicled its transition from a concentration camp for Polish political opponents to a factory of genocide.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello History Hit listeners, as you are listening to this right now at this exact second I am
0:05.8	currently on an epic cross-country road trip of England. 600 miles and 1 million years of history
0:14.4	from the first humans through to Stonehenge, Dovercastle, Hastings up to Ironbridge in the
0:19.3	Black Country and to the northeast where I'm visiting a Cold War bunker in York.
0:25.0	I want to hear from you. I want to do more stops. Tell me when I should stop. Any local tips or
0:29.8	hints that you want to share or you want to see me report on on my social media channels and Twitter
0:34.1	and Instagram etc. just send me a message ds.hh at historyhit.com. That's delta Sierra.
0:41.4	. hotel hotel at historyhit.com or tweet me at the History Guy. You can keep up with the road trip
0:47.4	this week on Instagram and Twitter at the History Guy on both and then you can hear the whole thing as a
0:52.1	podcast series next week. Thanks and enjoy this episode.
1:02.5	Hello everyone, welcome down to this History Hit, another remarkable story of resistance from the
1:07.3	Second World War today on the podcast. After we had the extraordinary story of the Dutch Resistance
1:13.9	heroines earlier in the week, please go and check that podcast out. Today we are talking about
1:19.3	the Polish Resistance in particular one extraordinarily brave Polish freedom fighter,
1:24.3	Vittold Pilecki who volunteered to go to Auschwitz and find out what was going on there.
1:31.7	Auschwitz concentration camp which would transition as the war went on into a site of industrial slaughter,
1:38.0	a site of genocide. And Vittold Pilecki was an eyewitness to that slaughter and he was the first
1:43.4	person to warn the outside world what was going on. In this podcast, he'll hear from storing jack
1:48.6	fair weather telling me the story of this absolutely extraordinary human being. Auschwitz is liberated
1:54.8	by the Soviet Red Army 75 years ago this month and we've got a lot of Holocaust related material
1:59.7	coming out over the next couple of weeks. It's absolutely fascinating. You can listen to it here
2:03.1	on the podcast or you can go to historyhit.tv, our new digital history channel. If you use the
	...

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