The Volunteer

Starred review from May 1, 2019
One man's remarkable heroism in the face of Nazi terror. Nothing about Auschwitz is pleasant reading. Thankfully, Fairweather (The Good War: Why We Couldn't Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan, 2014), a former correspondent for the Washington Post and the Daily Telegraph, delivers a well-written, riveting work. The protagonist is Polish resistance fighter Witold Pilecki (1901-1948), part of Poland's cavalry reserves, much of which was decimated by the blitzkrieg's main panzer thrust. With Warsaw surrounded, most military leaders left the country, but Pilecki and another officer banded together and organized the remaining soldiers. During this time, Germany continued to pit ethnic groups against each other and, mostly, against the Jews. Nationalism was flourishing, and attacks on Jews escalated. When Pilecki tried to fuse their group with the mainstream underground, his partner asked him to form a new group--in Auschwitz, to fight from the inside. Once inside, a Polish work foreman got him a builder's job, which allowed him to start developing resistance cells among prisoners. In addition to some brave locals, newly released prisoners passed on his reports to Warsaw and then to London. The camp doctor saved Pilecki's life more than once, but in many of his messages, Pilecki begged to have the camp, arsenals, and railways bombed. Despite his messages, the Allies made excuses, claiming that winning the war was the only way to control the camps. Based on the reports from Pilecki, they certainly knew that Auschwitz had become a death camp. Using myriad sources to paint the pictures of the camp's horrors, including the prime source, Pilecki's memoir, which has only recently been translated, Fairweather shines a powerful spotlight on a courageous man and his impressive accomplishments in the face of unspeakable evil. An inspiring story beautifully told.

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April 29, 2019
“Witold Pilecki volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz,” writes former war correspondent Fairweather in this immaculately detailed history, and rather than being heralded as a hero, he was tried, executed, and “effectively deleted from history” by his country. Fairweather mines letters, coded diaries, and personal interviews to tell the story of how Pilecki, a gentleman farmer and Polish cavalry officer, left his family, assumed a false identity, and handed himself over to the Gestapo for imprisonment at Auschwitz along with all the other military-age men in Warsaw. For two and a half years, he endured torture, starvation, and disease, witnessing Jewish families being led to the gas chambers and choking on the fumes from burning bodies, all the while risking his life to collect information on death tolls and building plans for death chambers and crematoriums that would be smuggled out by released upper-class prisoners. Pilecki was devastated when the Polish resistance and the Allies refused to believe that Auschwitz had become the center of the “final solution.” After escaping on his own, Pilecki returned to a Poland decimated by the fleeing Germans and seized by the encroaching Communist forces, which labeled him a traitor for opposing them and executed him. Fairweather tells this tragic tale in gripping fashion, bringing a new angle to the literature of the Holocaust. Illus. Agent: Larry Weissman, Larry Weissman Literary.

Starred review from June 1, 2019
Following the German conquest of Poland in 1939, officers of the defeated country's army coalesced into an underground resistance organization. When they learned of a mysterious camp in which the Nazis imprisoned their compatriots, they decided to collect intelligence by infiltrating the place with an operative. Witold Pilecki volunteered and contrived to be arrested and sent to Auschwitz. When he arrived in late 1940, it was not yet a murder factory, though its expansion into such a hideous facility is hinted at in various reports that Pilecki smuggled out to the Polish underground. Of more immediate importance to Pilecki was preparing his fellow Poles for a breakout and documenting Nazi atrocities inside the camp. Only a few Poles escaped, including Pilecki, and they then fought in the tragic Warsaw uprising of 1944. Pilecki survived, continued an underground life of resistance in postwar Poland, wrote a memoir about his experiences in Auschwitz, and was arrested by the communist regime, which put him to death in 1948. Drawing Pilecki's witnessing of appalling crimes into a forceful narrative with unstoppable reading momentum, Fairweather has created an insightful biography of a covert war hero and an extraordinary contribution to the history of the Holocaust.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)