Patricelli is a historical consultant on a Polish-US film project under the working title Enemy of My Enemy.
In an interview with the Rome correspondent of the Polish Press Agency (PAP), Patricelli said that back in 2018 he was contacted by actress and producer Elizabeth Stillwell on behalf of Powder Hound Pictures from Colorado.
He added that Patricelli told him that what made her impressed in the Pilecki story was above all the fact that Pilecki allowed himself to be arrested by the Germans and sent to the Nazi German concentration camp of Auschwitz.
“My brother, who told me about the book Il Voluntario (The Volunteer), described it as a ready-made film script,” Stillwell confessed to Patricelli.
Executive producer Jayne-Ann Tenggren (1917, Spectre) instantly asked him to join the production team.
Patricelli told the Polish Press Agency that he had worked closely with scriptwriter Matt King for the past few years, including several visits to Auschwitz.
“The Americans want to portray conditions in the camp, as well as the Warsaw Rising of 1944 (in which Pilecki fought after his escape from the camp), with meticulous attention to detail,” he said.
Location shooting is planned in Poland, US film studios and in Italy.
“I hope, in fact I’m almost certain, that Enemy of My Enemy will prove to be a great international movie, which will make Pilecki as universally known as Oskar Schindler, the hero of Steven Spielberg’s highly acclaimed Schindler’s List,” Patricelli said, adding “as a volunteer, hero and symbolic figure, he fully deserves it.”
The film will be jointly financed and produced by the Polish Film Institute and Powder Hound Pictures.
A soldier with the Polish Army, Pilecki volunteered for a Polish resistance operation that involved infiltrating the Nazi German Auschwitz concentration camp. He wrote an intelligence report about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, which, however, was ignored by the Allied powers.
After escaping from Auschwitz in 1943, Pilecki reached Warsaw, where he fought in the city's 1944 uprising against the Germans.
After the war, Pilecki went to Italy and joined the Polish armed forces in the West. He then returned to communist-ruled Poland as an intelligence agent.
He was captured and executed by Poland’s communist authorities in 1948, following a show trial in which he was charged with espionage and plans to assassinate several communist security service officials.
His burial place has never been found. In 1990, he was rehabilitated and in 2008 posthumously awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish state decoration. In 2013, he was posthumously promoted to the rank of colonel.
Pilecki is known as "the victim of two totalitarian systems." In 2012, his original 400-page Auschwitz Report was published in the United States under the title The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery.
(mk/gs)