In September 1940, while thousands in Warsaw were hiding from German patrols, one man walked the streets hoping to be arrested. This episode reconstructs the life of Witold Pilecki, born in 1901 in Karelia to a Polish family exiled after the 1863 uprising, a teenage scout and cavalry officer in the Polish-Soviet War, and later a farmer, painter, and poet. After co-founding the Secret Polish Army, he clashed with his ultra-nationalist commander, who then proposed that someone infiltrate a new camp called Auschwitz. Pilecki recognized the setup and accepted anyway.

As inmate 4859 he built the ZOW resistance network in five-man cells, ran a shadow economy of food and medicine, and spent seven months assembling a radio transmitter in the typhus-feared hospital attic to broadcast the truth. When no rescue came, he escaped through a bakery in April 1943 and by extraordinary coincidence sheltered with the real Tomasz Serafinski, whose identity he had borrowed. He fought in the Warsaw Uprising, then returned to spy on the new communist regime, was tortured, tried, and executed in 1948, and his name was banned in Poland for half a century.

• How the ZOW cell structure worked like watertight compartments against Gestapo torture
• Why the Home Army and the Red Army both concluded an uprising at Auschwitz was impossible
• Pilecki’s protection of a Warsaw couple hiding Jewish families from a blackmailer
• Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz, himself an Auschwitz survivor, rejecting the pleas for pardon
• Posthumous rehabilitation, the Order of the White Eagle, and the words of Poland’s chief rabbi