Entitled Enemy of My Enemy, the film is based on the book Il Voluntario (The Volunteer) by Italian historian Marco Patricelli, adapted for the screen by Matt King.
The director’s name has not yet been announced.
In the course of research for the project, producers Jayne-Ann Tenggren and Elizabeth Stillwell have worked with members of Pilecki’s family.
His great-grandson Krzysztof Kosior has told US media: “I was thrilled to read the script and to be working with the filmmakers. I am grateful this film is being made and that a global audience will know my great-grandfather’s story.”
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)
Source: deadline.com, Variety