Witold Pilecki - Wikipedia

On September 19, 1940, Witold Pilecki was voluntarily captured and sent to Auschwitz in order to smuggle out information and start a resistance. From the article:

"Pilecki was also a co-founder of the Secret Polish Army (Tajna Armia Polska), a resistance group in German-occupied Poland, and later a member of the underground Home Army (Armia Krajowa). He was the author of Witold's Report, the first comprehensive Allied intelligence report on Auschwitz concentration camp and the Holocaust.[1] He was a devout Roman Catholic.[2]

During World War II, he volunteered for a Polish resistance operation that involved being imprisoned in the Auschwitz death camp in order to gather intelligence and later escape. While in the camp, Pilecki organized a resistance movement and, as early as 1941, informed the Western Allies of Nazi Germany's Auschwitz atrocities.[3]

He escaped from the camp in 1943 after nearly two and a half years of imprisonment.[4] Pilecki took part as a combatant in the Warsaw Uprising[5] in August–October 1944.[6] He remained loyal to the London-based Polish government-in-exile after the Soviet-backed communist takeover of Poland and was arrested for espionage in 1947 by the Stalinist secret police (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa) on charges of working for "foreign imperialism", thought to be a euphemism for British Intelligence.[7][8] He was executed after a show trial in 1948. Until 1989, information about his exploits and fate was suppressed by the communist regime in Poland.[8][9]

As a result of his efforts, he is considered as "one of the greatest wartime heroes".[6][10][11] In the foreword to the book The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery,[12] Michael Schudrich, the Chief Rabbi of Poland, wrote as follows: "When God created the human being, God had in mind that we should all be like Captain Witold Pilecki, of blessed memory."[2] In the introduction to that book, Norman Davies, a British historian, wrote: "If there was an Allied hero who deserved to be remembered and celebrated, this was a person with few peers."[2] At the commemoration event of International Holocaust Remembrance Day held in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum on 27 January 2013, Ryszard Schnepf, the Polish Ambassador to the US, described Pilecki as a "diamond among Poland's heroes" and "the highest example of Polish patriotism".[11][13]"