Heroes of War: Poland

The astonishing story of Krystyna Skarbek who made her way home to Poland by way of still-neutral Hungary, crossing the mountainous frontier in December 1939 with the help of a Polish Olympic skier. Captured by the Gestapo, she gained her release and that of a comrade by biting her tongue until it bled, then feigning a tubercular cough. Later she worked in France for the Special Operations Executive, and in one spectacular episode arranged for the mutiny of conscripted Poles in German uniform manning a fortress on the Franco-Italian frontier.

Cichociemni were the Special Operations commandos who trained in Scotland and who were parachuted into Poland and other German-occupied countries to support local resistance groups under the control of the London-based Polish government in exile.

The extraordinary story of Witold Pilecki, the "Auschwitz Volunteer" who stepped into a German roundup one day in order to see for himself the conditions at the new concentration camp outside Warsaw, known to Poles as Oświęcim. He not only survived the experience but after nearly three years escaped to report the facts to London and eventually to write the story in excruciating detail.

Żegota, an underground organization with cells in Warsaw, Kraków, Vilnius, and Lwów that helped thousands of Jews survive the German occupation. Contrary to the well-established belief in Polish anti-Semitism, Poland was the only country in occupied Europe to have such an organization.

Working for the Cypher Bureau of the Polish General Staff, and using only encrypted messages, mathematician Marian Rejewski and two colleagues reverse-engineered an Enigma machine and built a "cryptologic bomb" to translate messages written by it. Weeks before the German and Russian invasions of September 1939, the Poles passed this information to Britain and France, and it became the unacknowledged basis of code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park.