been mistakenly assumed to be dead. Two backstories exist purporting to explain how Pilecki actually found himself in Auschwitz. In one version, he allowed himself to be captured by the occupying Germans in one of their Warsaw street round-ups, in order to infiltrate the camp. In the second version, he did that in the apartment of Eleonora Ostrowska, at ulica Wojska Polskiego (Polish Army Street) during a building search. Afterward, along with 1,705 other prisoners, between 21 and 22 September 1940, Pilecki reached Auschwitz where, under Serafiński's name, he was assigned prisoner number 4859. In autumn of 1941 he learnt that he had been promoted to porucznik (first lieutenant) by people "far away in the outside world in Warsaw". While in various slave labor kommandos and surviving pneumonia at Auschwitz, Pilecki organized an underground Military Organization Union (Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, ZOW). Its tasks were to improve the morale of the inmates, provide news from outside the camp, distribute extra food and clothing to its members, set up intelligence networks, and train detachments to take over the camp in the event of a relief attack. ZOW was organized as secret cells, each of five members. Over time, many smaller underground organizations at Auschwitz eventually merged with ZOW. As part of his duties, Pilecki secretly drew up reports and sent them to Home Army headquarters with the help of inmates that have been released or escapees. The first dispatch, delivered in October 1940, described the camp and the ongoing extermination of inmates via starvation and brutal punishments; it was used as the basis of a Home Army report on "The terror and lawlessness of the occupiers". Further dispatches of Pilecki's were likewise smuggled out by individuals who managed to escape from Auschwitz. The reports' purpose may have been to get the Home Army command's permission for ZOW to stage an uprising to liberate the camp; however, no such response came from the Home Army. In 1942, Pilecki's resistance movement was also using a home-made radio transmitter to broadcast details on the number of arrivals and deaths in the camp and the conditions of the inmates using a radio transmitter that was built by camp inmates. The secret radio station was built over seven months using smuggled parts. It broadcast from the camp until the autumn of 1942, when it was dismantled by Pilecki's men after concerns that the Germans might discover its