36 years ago: Witold Pilecki’s name was finally cleared! On October 1st 1990, the Supreme Court in Warsaw acquitted Witold Pilecki and his co-defendants, overturning the death sentence imposed in 1948. It had taken 42 years to clear the name of one of the greatest freedom heroes in the 20th century who was executed by Poland’s Stalinist regime. Why so long? Throughout the communist era, Pilecki’s name was all but banished from public life. His family suffered discrimination; his children were denied admission to university. This is all the more striking given that communist Poland, unlike eg the GDR, went through a political thaw and a cautious, gradual process of de-Stalinisation. Some Home Army soldiers were acquitted; even some Stalinist judges were convicted. Yet in Pilecki’s case, the communist rulers remained unyielding. One of the first accounts of his extraordinary life, by Józef Garliński, appeared in London in 1974. His detailed Auschwitz report, written in 1945, was not published in Polish until 2000. English and German editions followed in 2012 and 2013. As Europe grappled with its wartime past in the 1950s and 1960s, Pilecki’s voice went unheard. His absence left a painful gap in Europe’s collective memory. His defence of freedom against totalitarianism is more relevant than ever. Having fought for an independent Poland in the Polish–Soviet War, Pilecki deliberately had himself arrested in 1940 to gain access to Auschwitz. Inside the camp, he built a resistance network and sent accounts of what he witnessed and learned to the Polish underground. His reports also reached the Polish government-in-exile. After the war, he documented the crimes of Poland’s communist rulers. The Stalinist regime executed him. “Fortunately, [my mother] lived to see [my father’s rehabilitation]. For me, this was a tremendous relief. In communist Poland, we spoke about my father only at home, among ourselves, without publicly acknowledging that we belonged to Captain Pilecki’s family. Yet I kept reassuring my mother: ‘You’ll see, people will have a great deal to say about Dad one day.’ And that is what happened. After the acquittal, it was as though someone had lifted a barrier. But keeping his memory alive required a hard struggle; it did not happen by itself,” recalls his son, Andrzej Pilecki, in Pilecki. Śladami mojego taty (Pilecki: In My Father’s Footsteps), by Mirosław Krzyszkowski and Bogdan Wasztyl (Znak Horyzont, Kraków, 2018).