On this date in 1948, Polish officer Witold Pileski was executed on a trumped up charge of espionage by the Polish communist government. The charge was political, part of a purge to remove opponents of the new Soviet puppet state.

At the trial, the court refused to allow Pilecki's extraordinary wartime service into evidence. Pilecki volunteered to go to Auschwitz. There he formed a resistance group and smuggled reports on Nazi barbarism to the outside world.

WARNING: the attached post is about the Holocaust and though I refrained from including graphic photographs, I did include the artwork of Holocaust survivors and explicit descriptions and quotes about the brutal conditions of Auschwitz that may by be unsettling.