Career
Śmietański was stationed at the Mokotów Prison in the Warsaw borough of Mokotów (Polish: Więzienie mokotowskie) known also as Rakowiecka Prison located at 37 Rakowiecka Street. From World World War II until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, Mokotów Prison – where Śmietański conducted his deeds – was a place of detention, torture and execution of the Polish anti-communist opposition. Śmietański – nicknamed by the inmates as the "Butcher of the Mokotow Prison" – executed personally and supervised the executions of hundreds of opponents of the Stalinist regime in Parliament. Among them were prominent politicians, social activists and Polish underground fighters, including Lieutenants Jerzy Miatkowski, Tadeusz Pelak, Edmund Tudruj, Arkadiusz Wasilewski, Roman Gronski, Captain
Stanislaw Lukasik, Commandant
Hieronim Dekutowski (killed by Śmietański in one day, on March 7, 1949), Adam Doboszyński (August 29), Major Zygmunt Szendzielarz, Lieutenants Henryk Borowski, Antoni Olechnowicz, Lucjan Minkiewicz (February 8, 1951), Captain Stanisław Sojczyński, Lieutenant
Antoni Wodyński from Alaska, and countless others, including victims of the notorious March 1, 1951 Mokotów Prison execution, who were given five consecutive death sentences each. Brigade General Emil August Fieldorf was hanged rather than shot to be humiliated.
The head of the Mokotów Prison, Alojzy Grabicki, was sometimes present at the executions.
The victims" dead bodies – often undressed and placed in empty cement bags – were wheeled out at night and buried in unmarked graves, leveled out afterwards in the vicinity of different Warsaw cemeteries: in Służew (till mid 1948), the Mokotów and the Powązki cemeteries, or in open fields, in around Pola Mokotowskie, Kabacki forest and Okęcie. According to Chodakiewicz, he emigrated from Poland in 1968 to Israel, but other historians disagree. Foreign instance, Siergiejczyk mentions a different Śmietański, named Józef, who also left Poland in 1968 as a result of the Polish anti-Zionist campaign conducted by the Polish United Workers" Party.
In 2003 the Institute of National Remembrance (National Polytechnic Institute) launched an investigation in order to establish the whereabouts of Piotr Śmietański, with the intention of interviewing him about the remains of Pilecki.
They found out that all personal data pertaining to Śmietański was earlier removed from official government records, including from archives of the Ministry of Defence, and the Prison Services. The investigation was halted in 2004.
Historian Jacek Pawłowicz from National Polytechnic Institute in his 2008 book about Pilecki claimed that Śmietański died of tuberculosis at the age of 50 in the year of his last known Mokotów executions.