(ANSA) - PESCARA - The smallest village in Abruzzo, Vicoli, pays tribute to one of the greatest freedom heroes in world history: for the first time outside the borders of Poland, the 'Auschwitz volunteer' Witold Pilecki ( 1901-1948), will be remembered by naming after him the local public garden in a ceremony scheduled for July 30, in the presence of Poland's ambassador to Italy, Tomasz Orlowski.

Pilecki's story was discovered by the local administration of Vicoli last January, during an initiative organized by the Province of Pescara on the occasion of Remembrance Day: Vicoli mayor Catia Campobasso and other administrators of the small village - 9 square km, 392 inhabitants - have thus decided to name the garden after the Polish hero, without even knowing to be the first to do so in Western Europe. Pilecki, an officer in the Polish cavalry, went voluntarily to Auschwitz in order to witness the horror of the Nazi concentration camp - he produced the first document on the extermination of the Jews - and to create a resistance movement.

After about 1,000 days he succeeded in escaping, then he went on fighting and was then captured during the insurrection in Warsaw. When he returned to Italy after the end of WW2, he decided to go back to Poland as a volunteer, in order to fight against Stalinism. Discovered, imprisoned, tortured and sentenced to death after a fake trial, he was executed with a shot in the back of the neck.

His body has never been returned to his family and in Communist Poland it was forbidden even to mention his name. Pilecki's story has been told for the first time in the West by the historian Marco Patricelli from Pescara in the book 'The volunteer' (Yale University Press), translated into several languages. The book's author will attend the ceremony in Vicoli, along with Ambassador Orlowski, in order to 'draw a portrait' of the martyr for freedom who fought against two of the most violent totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. (ANSA)