After surviving Auschwitz and imprisonment, Władysław Bartoszewski risked everything to save thousands of innocent lives, guided by a simple belief that doing the right thing was never optional.

 On the morning of September 19, 1940, German soldiers ran a roundup through the Żoliborz district of Warsaw. An eighteen-year-old named Władysław Bartoszewski was caught in it. He was working at a Polish Red Cross clinic at the time, but that meant nothing to the soldiers who stopped him.

Three days later, on September 22, he arrived at Auschwitz. The camp had been running for only a few months. He was registered as prisoner 4427.

He stayed there for 199 days. On April 8, 1941, he was released, after intervention that involved the Polish Red Cross, though the exact chain of events behind his release was never fully settled even in the camp's own records. He walked out at nineteen.

He did not disappear into a quiet life. He went back into the underground.

Bartoszewski had grown up near Warsaw's Jewish quarter, on Bielańska Street, and many of the children he had played with as a boy were Jewish. By 1942, the Germans were murdering Polish Jews on a mass scale, and helping a Jew in occupied Poland could carry the death penalty, for the helper and often for their family. Bartoszewski knew this, and he joined the effort anyway.

He worked first with the Provisional Committee for Aid to Jews, and then, from December 4, 1942, with its successor organization, known by the codename Żegota. Żegota was the only organization in occupied Europe set up by an underground state specifically to help Jews. Bartoszewski helped supply forged documents, among them false papers that let people take on new, Christian identities.

He later said that between 1942 and 1944, the network produced more than 50,000 documents. "Each of them helped, but which one helped? We did not keep such statistics," he said. Historians generally describe the number of Jews actually saved through Żegota's work as several thousand, though one estimate holds that as many as 40,000 to 50,000 people benefited in some way from its activities.

Bartoszewski did not describe himself as brave. "I was very afraid," he said of that period.

In 1944 he fought in the Warsaw Uprising as a soldier of the Home Army. He survived it, as he had survived Auschwitz.

The war's end did not bring him safety. Poland's new communist authorities arrested him in 1946 and again in 1949, convicting him on espionage charges that were false. He spent close to seven years in their prisons before his final release in 1954. In 1955, Poland's Supreme Military Court found that he had been unjustly convicted.

He went on to become a historian and writer, lecturing at universities in Poland and Germany despite never finishing his own university degree.

On December 14, 1965, Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations. He received the medal the following year.

Three decades later, in 1995, he became Poland's Minister of Foreign Affairs, and he held the post again from 2000 to 2001. He died in Warsaw on April 24, 2015, at the age of ninety-three.

Years afterward, the writer Michał Komar had asked him why he had risked his life, over and over, for people who were often strangers to him.

Bartoszewski answered in seven words: "Because I could not have done otherwise."