Name: Józef Pilecki (Uses Josef Schmidt as an alias in Germany)
Appearance:
As luck would have it, Józef happens to appear rather Aryan despite his Polish heritage. Underneath the cap in the picture lies a head of blond hair. He has also built up a non-trivial amount of muscle over the years, which he tends to hide behind a coat of some sort. While he has blond hair and blue eyes, his facial structure doesn't match up with that of a "true" Aryan. However, it was deemed "close enough" by his comrades in the TAP.
Age: 27
Nationality/Ethnicity: Polish. Baptized as a Roman Catholic, recently began to consider himself atheist.
Political Affiliation: Józef is a member of the Tajna Armia Polska (Secret Polish Army), and is actively working to fight the Nazi occupation of Poland. He has a deep hatred of the Nazis, and makes sure to keep up with the latest intelligence on their activities. His main goal has always been to liberate Poland, though recently his hatred of the Nazis has extended far beyond its original bounds.
Occupation: Cavalry Lieutenant (Pre-War), Laboratory Assistant (Cover), TAP Lieutenant
Personality: Józef is always somewhat aloof, and only talks to others out of necessity. Rarely does he express emotion in his speech, instead covering all of them up with clinical words and a forced bored monotone. When he does express emotion, it is always in the form of losing his temper. Since about a month after he joined the project, he has become increasingly hostile towards the others. Every so often he will pepper his speech with passive-aggressive insults and more spiteful tones. This is all thanks to his deep hatred of the Nazis, along with his inability to see the difference between Germans and Nazis. He considers everyone around him a monster, and it is often all he can do to not just assault them. He is constantly paranoid of having his cover broken, and his impulsive tendencies don't make him feel any safer. He tends to form deeply held opinions about others just after meeting them, and changing these opinions is often nearly impossible.
Magical attributes (if applicable): Józef has had significant exposure to magic, having been present on the day of its discovery as well as cleaning the room afterwards. While he most certainly has magical ability, it took him months to realize it. He often woke up with a random object in his hand, always something he had seen in a dream (Though not always a dream he remembered). For the most part, it was an innocent object like a pencil or random laboratory instrument. Obviously, he began to think that someone was messing with him, and became extremely paranoid that he his cover had been broken.
Then, one morning he woke up holding a letter from his brother. It was one sent a while back, brought all the way from Auschwitz by TAP operatives. It was the first one that described the supposed POW camp near the town in detail, and thus had gone straight into the fire after being read. There was no way it could have possible been put into his hand. Even if it hadn't been burnt, if someone else had found it he would have been dead by then. He began to suspect that it was the magic, but didn't bring it for fear of being found out.
As time went on, he began to summon objects with increasing frequency. Every morning he would wake up with something in his hand, which he usually either left at the lab or burnt. Some things, however, he just hid. Finally, he summoned something outside of bed. While he was cleaning laboratory tools, his old saber appeared in his hands with a flash of light. Needless to say, explaining his possession of a Polish Cavalry saber wasn't the easiest thing to do (He settled on saying a friend in the Wehrmacht had sent it to him after the invasion). Since then, he has had many more accidents. Luckily, he's always come up with a way to explain or hide the summoned objects. Even so, he doubts he can keep it a secret for long.
The summoning ability had clear-cut limitations, absolutely none of which anybody is actually aware of. The summoned object must exist/have existed in the past. As such, it is absolutely impossible to summon an object from the modern world. Józef must also have seen the object in question personally. This means he might summon things he only saw in his peripheral vision. However, it also means that he can't summon anything he has only seen in a photograph, or anything he's never seen/heard of for that matter. Only inanimate objects can be summoned, so it is impossible to summon something like a dog or a horse, much less a person. Finally, it is impossible for the object to be summoned without touching Józef's hands.
Background: Józef was born to the Polish Pilecki family in 1914 in the town of Wilno (AKA Vilnius), Lithuania. He was Józef Pilecki after his grandfather, who had the same name. The family's history was a turbulent one, having been forcibly resettled to Karelia, where Józef's brother Witold was born. In 1910, the family moved to Wilno, his parents giving birth to him four years later. When he was barely a week old, the Great War broke out. The family managed to stay together, with Józef's father being disabled an unable to fight in the war. Even so, they still felt its effects. In 1915 the German Army moved into the town and placed it under occupation. Witold became involved with the Polish Scouting and Guiding Association (ZHP) in 1918, and shortly afterward Lithuania was granted control of the city in the Act of Independence of Lithuania.
For a brief while, the newly formed nation of Poland controlled the city. However, the Soviets soon took the city. Józef's brother Witold, being part of the ZHP, conducted partisan warfare against them for a time. In 1919 Józef fell ill with an unknown sickness, while at the same time Witold joined the Polish Army's Cavalry. While Witold fought the Soviets, Józef fought his sickness. The very fact that he survived was a miracle, and every doctor predicted that he would die before his sixth birthday. In 1920 Witold returned to Wilno in an operation to liberate it, marking the first time in two years that he had seen his family.
Józef, having defied all odds and fought off his illness, didn't even remember his brother. Even so, for the short time they were together, they became very close despite the substantial age difference (Witold was 19 at the time). When he left, Witold continued to write home to Józef, and their bond only strengthened. When the war was over, the two spent a lot of time together in Wilno. At that point it was an independent nation (The Republic of Central Lithuania), thanks to the events of Żeligowski's Mutiny. In 1922, when Józef was eight, the city was annexed by Poland after highly contested elections. In 1923, the international community recognized Poland's sovereignty over the city (which had only a 6% Lithuanian population).
In 1933, at the age of 19, Józef enrolled in the Stefan Batory University in Wilno. He recieved a degree in physics from the university, and made a new friend by the name of Marian Zdziechowski. Marian was one of his professors, and an outspoken critic of Fascism, Communism, and totalitarianism in general. Marian's ideas rubbed off of Józef, and combined with his unbreakable bond with his brother, led him to join the Polish Army in 1938. He joined just in time for a Soviet bullet to shoot his horse out from under him in the invasion of Poland.
It was pure luck that he escaped the incident unscathed. He jumped off the horse at just the right time to avoid being crushed, and made it out on the back of a fellow cavalryman's horse. When Poland fell to the Nazis and Soviets, he was invited to join the TAP by Witold, one of the three founding members. Filled with hatred of the occupiers, he accepted and acted as a courier. Though he was only supposed to carry messages, he often read them as well. This led him to carry out the orders in the message, instead of delivering it to the agent who was meant to do so. These were usually attacks on Nazi and Soviet officers, and over time, Józef became an expert at killing.
Combined with his strength and experience gained during his short time in the Army, his attacks were frightfully effective. Sometimes he simply used a gun or Molotov cocktail, sometimes he fashioned a bomb, and sometimes he just picked up the nearest blunt object and battered the target to death. Seeing his skill, Witold offered to make him an official assassin, an offer he immediately accepted. He was given free reign on how to deal with the target, and he often infiltrated meetings in order to do so. He generally stole a uniform and gun, smuggled in a grenade, listened in on the meeting until the end, then threw the grenade and ran. Anyone who got in his way, he killed. Failure meant identification, and he never let himself be identified.
When Witold decided to willingly go to Auschwitz and write of what was truly going on, he made a proposition to Józef. Spies in Berlin had discovered that the Humboldt University was working on some kind of secret physics-related project. If the Nazis were working on a secret project, it couldn't mean anything good for the allies or the TAP. He gave Józef the option of infiltrating the university and learning what was going on. After a couple days of thought, he agreed. The two went their separate ways, one to hell and the other to Berlin.
He infiltrated the university, earning a job as a laboratory assistant in the project. His hatred of Nazis didn't mesh well with the environment, and he mostly kept to himself. When he got a letter from Witold, he became far more aggressive towards the Germans around him. The letter (passed through the camp's laundry) described the horrors of Auschwitz, speaking of the gas chambers, the crematoriums, the backbreaking work, and even rumors of horrific experiments carried out in secret. It only fueled his hate of the Nazis, and every day it got harder for him to hold back his anger.
He sees magic as nothing more than another Nazi weapon, an accidentally developed one, but a weapon nonetheless. He knows that the Reich will eventually try to use it in the military, and when they do, he will have to stop them using any means necessary. Otherwise, the Resistance-perhaps even the Allies-will have no chance at victory, and the horrors in Auschwitz and the other camps will end only when there is nobody left to kill.
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