My Visit Inside Rakowiecka Prison in Warsaw

Last week I had the unique opportunity to visit the infamous Rakowiecka Prison (also known as the Mokotów Prison) in Warsaw along with my fellow history seminar participants. The Prison is situated on roughly 17 acres of land in the Mokotów district, south of downtown. Originally constructed between 1902 and 1904, it was the state-of-the-art prison in all of Imperial Russia (which controlled roughly half of Poland at the time). It featured novelties such as central heating and indoor plumbing, which had yet to make their way to much of the population.

Our tour of the prison began with a lengthy talk by one of the administrators who outlined the history of the facility while looking at a detailed model showing all of the buildings within the grounds. The room where we were standing served as both a chapel and a meeting room where films were occasionally shown. Adjacent to it was the “Memory Room”, which featured text panels and displays of objects tied to the history of the prison. Most striking was some memorabilia unearthed at Mednoye, where several 6,311 Poles were killed and buried by the Soviet NKVD in 1940, among them many civil servants, including numerous prison guards who had worked on Rakowiecka. After the Nazi and Soviet conquest of Poland, the prison served the purposes of the German occupiers. Among the Poles kept at the prison and later killed in the Palmiry forest outside of Warsaw, was Janusz Kusociński, a well-known athlete who won the gold medal in the 10,000 meter event at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles.

During the Warsaw Uprising, the SS proceeded to liquidate the prison population, which consisted of resistance soldiers from the underground, killing 600 of them in the prison courtyard. Several hundred of the remaining prisoners fought back and managed to escape with the help of Warsaw residents in the neighborhood. The SS retaliated by killing about 400 local civilians in the north-east corner of the prison grounds. During the Stalinist era, the Rakowiecka Prison served as the main penitentiary of the Ministry of Public Security, the communist, secret police force. Thousands of Home Army soldiers and other members of the underground resistance were imprisoned, tortured and killed in Poland from 1944-1953, many of them at Rakowiecka, though the total number of executions carried out in the prison itself is unknown. Among the best known inmates and ultimately victims of Rakowiecka and its communist overlords was Witold Pilecki, a Home Army soldier and volunteer who willfully allowed himself to be arrested to be placed in the Auschwitz concentration camp to report back to the underground on conditions there. He spent over two and a half years as an inmate, surviving the murderous environment of the Nazi’s most infamous death camp.

Pilecki escaped in 1943 and rejoined the Home Army, taking part in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. After the uprising was quelled, he was sent to Oflag VII-A in Murnau, a prisoner camp for Polish officers (where both of my grandfathers spent most of World War II). His luck ran out when he elected to return to Poland after the war to continue the resistance to the communists. He was arrested, brutally tortured, subjected to a show trial and ultimately executed through a shot to the back of the head, most likely in an underground corridor between the main prison block and the building next door, where interrogations were carried out. His body, like that of hundreds of others, was unceremoniously dumped and buried in an unmarked part of the Powązki Cemetery known as the “Ł Quarter” or “Meadow”.

The Rakowiecka Prison is still fully functional and we were able to walk through the main prison block and step into one of the cells, all while prisoners were returning from their daily walks in the “spacerniak” (a small shed-like structure with an open roof) and being patted down by guards before returning to their confinement. Unlike most memorials which are static, the Rakowiecka Prison serves as a living testament to the tragic fate of Poland in the 20th Century. After 25 years of freedom in Poland (the longest such period for the country since the 18th century), one hopes that the types of things that happened here a few generations ago remain only memories.