One man's daring mission to infiltrate Auschwitz revealed its atrocities to the world – this is his story.

On 27 January 1945, prisoners at the main camp of Auschwitz watched as the soldiers of the First Ukrainian Front came and opened the gates under the mocking words of "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Makes Freedom"). After more than four years of terror, they were finally being set free.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the most notorious war-time concentration camp in the world, where more 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered on these grounds.

Auschwitz was established in 1940 when Nazi Germany opened a new camp complex in Oświęcim in southern Poland to hold prisoners. What began as a political prison of Polish nationals evolved into a death factory of Europe's Jews, and the name Auschwitz would soon become synonymous with genocide and the Holocaust. During its first year of operation, little was known about the camp's activities, until one man decided to risk his life to find out.

To the guards and other prisoners, this man was Tomasz Serafiński, prisoner number 4859, a Jew who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But to a small group of an underground resistance group against Nazi Germany, his name was Witold Pilecki, second lieutenant in the army, an intelligence agent, a husband and father to two children and a Catholic.

"Witold Pilecki was one of the founders of the resistance movement organisation called the Secret Polish Army – TAP, for short," said Dr Piotr Setkiewicz, historian at Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. "When TAP had news of the new Auschwitz camp, discussions began about sending someone there to find out what was happening there. Pilecki agreed to take on this task."

"It should be emphasised that at that time no one in TAP knew what Auschwitz was," Setkiewicz continued. "It was only then that the first telegrams informing about the deaths of people deported in the first transport from Warsaw began to arrive."

However, Pilecki needed a plan to get in. So, on a September day in 1940 he arranged to be in his sister-in-law's apartment in Warsaw's Żoliborz neighbourhood during a police raid and used the Jewish identity of a deceased Polish soldier to ensure he was arrested. Three days later, Pilecki was marched through the gates inscribed with the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei", where he would spend the next two and a half years infiltrating the camp and sending evidence to warn the world about its activities, all the while subjected to the hard work, hunger and risks of death like any other prisoner.

Commemorating the anniversary

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum will be holding a day of memorial ceremony on 27 January 2025 with the attendance of worldwide dignitaries. International visitors will be able watch from a special tent area on this day;........

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