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 Apr ...