Mansfield's Book of Manly Men (221-230)
- You are called to sacrifice. There just isn’t a way to say it any more clearly. Genuine manhood, manly manhood, true manhood—is sacrifice. To do manly things, tend your field, make manly men, and live to the glory of God—in other words, to fulfill all the Manly Maxims—you have to sacrifice.
- Sacrifice what? Everything. Anything. Not your integrity or morality or commitments to God, but certainly your comforts, your rights, your time, your money, your attention, and your energy. You have to sacrifice the priority of yourself.
- One thing is certain: we are to give ourselves up. Just as Jesus did for his church. Dying to save her. Dying to rescue her. Dying to present her pure to her God.
- Isn’t it interesting that the stereotype of a modern man is exactly opposite this? You’ve seen this stereotype played out on the screen. The man is all about himself. His food, his hobbies, his addictions, his deformities, and his vanities dominate his life and the lives in his family. He is one big black hole of self, a giant suck hole of self-interest.
- His name was Witold (Vee-told) Uilecki.
- He was born on May 13, 1901, in Russia. These words would have made him wince.
- His family had been forcibly removed to Russia from their beloved Poland as punishment for a Polish uprising in the 1860s.
- Witold exemplified the Polish soul. He played guitar, painted, wrote poetry, composed songs, gave himself fully to his Catholic faith, and dreamed of a free Polish homeland.
- He was also fiercely courageous.
- While still a teenager, he secretly joined a Polish equivalent of the Boy Scouts, though it had been outlawed by Soviet Russia. He fought in guerrilla units during the Soviet-Polish war that followed the First World War and took his examinations to graduate from high school only after that conflict ended.
- He attended college and then officer training classes, which allowed him to be commissioned as a lieutenant in the Polish army in 1926.
- He married, had two children, inherited his family’s small estate in Belarus, and helped develop paramilitary units in his home region. He was so effective he was awarded the Silver Cross of Merit in 1938. World War II began the next year.
- The invading Germans defeated his 19th Infantry Division on the sixth of September.
- Witold stayed in his homeland and helped organize an underground resistance movement—the Tajna Armia Polska, or TAP—the Polish Secret Army. The TAP was built on Christian principles, had no political party affiliation, and grew to as many as twelve thousand men.
- Not long after, intelligence reached the TAP that people were being gassed at a prison camp in Auschwitz.
- On September 19, 1940, Witold Pilecki tucked forged identity papers into his jacket, kissed his wife and two children good-bye, and intentionally walked into a Nazi roadblock. He was on a mission—a mission to get himself sent to Auschwitz.
- The sketchy journals he was able to smuggle out give some indication of the horrors he endured. They are filled with Nazi butchery, tales of crematoriums, pseudo-medical experiments, and the Nazi delight in killing Poles.
- Witold was imprisoned in Auschwitz for 947 days—more than two and a half years—days filled with starvation, beatings, and torture.
- Yet they were also days of success, for he fulfilled every assignment the Polish Underground gave him. Then he escaped.
- While much of the world celebrated the close of World War II, patriotic Poles quickly realized they had fought Nazi oppression only to end up under equally evil Soviet rule.
- Witold, ever the patriot, threw himself into this new fight. He again joined an underground movement, taking dangerous assignments to gather intelligence on Soviet operations. He was eventually captured by communist Poles who were in league with the Soviet Union. He was interrogated endlessly, tortured to the threshold of death, and finally found guilty in a farce of a trial in which he received three death sentences.
- Just before his execution, he wrote a poem that includes the line, “For though I should lose my life, I prefer it so, than to live, and bear a wound in my heart.” This “wound” was knowledge that anyone else should suffer for his spying. He was executed on May 25, 1948, at Warsaw’s Mokotow Prison.
- He had lived his life for his people and had given everything again and again. He is one of the greatest heroes of Poland, but he is also one of the greatest examples of self-sacrifice we can know.
- To choose Auschwitz with all its hellish tortures and death required an almost complete surrender of personal preference, inwardly cutting ties with everything dear in this life. This is the essence of being both a man and a patriot.
- Simply through the mandate of being men, though, we are asked to surrender our rights and comforts for a higher cause—the responsibility for all we are given as men. Our rights come after the requirements of God, of course, but they also come after whatever is required to serve our wives, to invest in the lives of our children, to stand for righteousness in our communities, or to tend anything else that is within the field assigned to us.
- Being a man is a privilege, not an entitlement. It is a surrender of our priority. It is a laying down of our lives, not physically but inwardly—our preferences, our pleasures, sometimes even our dreams.
- “A RACE, LIKE AN INDIVIDUAL, LIFTS ITSELF UP BY LIFTING OTHERS UP.”—Booker T. Washington
