The film recounts the story of the trial of Captain of Cavalery Witold Pileckii in 1947/1948.
In 1920, while still a student at a junior high school, Witold Pilecki participated in the defense of Vilnius against the Soviet army. During the September 1939 campaign the division under his command destroyed 7 tanks and shot down 2 planes of the enemy. In 1940, during a random street arrest in Warsaw’s district of Zoliborz, Commander Pilecki allowed the Germans to detain him and deport him to Auschwitz. His goal was to create an underground military unit within the concentration camp, organize an attack of Home Army units coordinated with an air-bombing campaign by the allied forces, and liberate the camp. After two years of imprisonment and the failure of these plans he escaped from Auschwitz. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, Pilecki was the commander of the Second Compaign of the First Batallion of the Army Group “Chrobry II”. Afterwards, he found his way to the West and joined the Polish Army led by General Anders.
In 1945 he received an order to return to Poland and continue working in the underground military unit „NIE” („No”) created a year earlier by Colonel „Nil” Fieldorf.
Probosz starred as the Polish WWII hero Witold Pilecki in the film The Death of Captain Pilecki, which garnered the Special Jury REMI Award at the 2007 WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival and has had screenings at consulates, universities and embassies throughout the world. In 2013, he recorded the audiobook of The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery, by Captain Witold Pilecki, for Audible.com. The print book, on which Probosz’s United Solo Festival performance is based, received the prestigious PROSE Award for Biography and Autobiography from the Association of American Publishers and the Silver Award for Autobiography/Memoir from the Independent Book Publishers Association. It garnered excellent reviews from The New York Times Sunday Book Review, where it was chosen an Editors’ Choice, New Republic, Atlantic, Wall St. Journal, and many other media outlets, and has been translated and published foreign languages from China to Europe.
