Monkey - An 8 week old Scottish Fold. :)
I don’t know if I’ve ever felt this way about someone before. but it’s nice to have crazy butterflies and to be in love again.
On this day in 1948, Witold Pilecki, a Polish spy was executed for aiding foreign espionage among a dozen other charges after a fake trial and repeated gruesome torture.
Pilecki joined the Polish army in 1939 and fought on the front lines against the German invasion to Poland. A few months later, he was invited into the Polish Secret Army (TAP) and soon after became a founding member and commander.
By 1940, Pilecki was ready to present his plan to his higher-ups: He was ready to PURPOSELY PLACE HIMSELF IN AUSCHWITZ in order to gain intelligence on what was happening inside. At this time, virtually nothing was known about the inside of these camps and Pilecki acknowledged that something needed to be done to find out. The plan was accepted and on September 19, 1940, he went on a street that the TAP knew there would be a round-up on of Jews.
During his three years in Auschwitz, Pilecki gave invaluable information to the TAP that helped them find out the situation in the camps, the makeup of the Nazi army, and much more. His reports even began being forwarded to British Intelligence to help them figure out how to best attack the army and deal with the camps. Meanwhile, he survived two bouts of pneumonia and just generally being a prisoner in Auschwitz. When he finally broke out of the camp, he managed to bring across hugely important German documents with statistics about the army and the camps themselves.
In 1944 when the Warsaw Uprising took place, Pilecki once again found himself in the resistance movement and once again assumed some command. He and his soldiers were inside the Greater Bastion of Warsaw, which basically did an awesome job destroying German supplies and infantrymen. Pilecki was soon caught and spent a year in a Prisoner of War camp, this time unintentionally.
Once he was out, he basically went straight back to being fucking awesome and started gathering intelligence on the Soviet Gulags until he was once again arrested in May of 1947, this time by Poland’s Ministry of Public Security. He was put on trial in March of the following year, but in those 10 months he was savagely tortured for information on the resistance movement. His trial was simply a show trial and he was unsurprisingly found guilty of crimes ranging from crossing the border illegally to conspiring the assassination of Polish officials and was sentenced to death. (The picture above is from this trial)
Though Pilecki has now been given the honors he deserves, he died at the hands of the system he had fought against and without even a marked grave.
Spare him a thought today. He was pretty fucking badass.
I think about Witold Pilecki every day though.
(Source: justlittlethings)
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(via Baby coatimundi.)
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I just want to feel special and like I matter to people. I don’t feel like I matter at all.
and I want to stop hating my body. I just want to hibernate sometimes.
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(Source: synodik, via c0uples)
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