The hero who sent himself to Hell . . .

THE VOLUNTEER by Jack Fairweather (W.H. Allen £20, 528pp)

IN 1940, who in their right minds would volunteer to be imprisoned in Auschwitz? Witold Pilecki, the extraordinary hero of this book, did exactly that. ‘You must be nuts!’ a fellow prisoner told him. But he was just exceptionally brave.

When Germany invaded Poland, Pilecki — a gentleman farmer — did his patriotic duty and volunteered as a soldier. The German forces routed the Poles in weeks, so Pilecki made his way to Warsaw, reduced to ruins by German bombing. There, in a Baroque church, he knelt with others and ‘swore to serve God, the Polish nation, and each other’. The resistance movement had begun.

In early 1940, Auschwitz was established as a camp for Polish political prisoners. The resistance needed eyes and ears in the camp, so Pilecki agreed to be captured by the Germans and sent there.

He was immediately aware he was in a hellish place when a man was beaten to death before his eyes. The SS were in charge, but the day-today running of the camp was in the hands of the

kapos, inmates given power over their fellow prisoners. The worst of these was ‘a giant chunk of meat and fat’ named Ernst Krankemann, whose party trick was to harness men to a giant roller used for road construction. He beat them as they pulled it; if any fell, they were flattened beneath the roller. In 1941, after several hundred Soviet PoWs were beaten to death in a gravel pit by

kapos with shovels, Pilecki realised that simply surviving long enough in Auschwitz to get word back to Warsaw would be difficult.

Then, as plans were made to turn Auschwitz into ‘the central hub of the Final Solution’, trainloads of people began to arrive. Children and the elderly were gassed immediately; the young and healthy were worked to death in nearby labour camps. Pilecki worked sorting goods taken from the dead, at one point processing hair shorn from the corpses of Jewish women for use as mattress stuffing. He was close to despair. He had sent many messages to the Polish resistance about the staggering crimes he was witnessing, but had they got through?

By 1943, Pilecki began to think of breaking out, but of 173 escape attempts the previous year, only about a dozen had worked. Then one day he and two others ran from a bakery to which they had been sent to work, taking with them cured tobacco to scatter on their trail to throw pursuit dogs off their scent and potassium cyanide tablets if all went wrong.

It didn’t. They got away. Pilecki found to his horror his despatches from the hell of Auschwitz had been disbelieved by resistance leaders. Some thought he was a German agent.

It would be good to learn there was a happy ending to Witold Pilecki’s story. Sadly, there wasn’t. After the war, he was found guilty of treason by the new Communist regime. On May 25, 1948, he was executed in a Warsaw prison by a single shot to the back of the head.

In post-communist Poland, Witold Pilecki is a national hero. Jack Fairweather’s remarkable book shows why his courageous efforts to alert the world to what was happening in Auschwitz deserve to be remembered everywhere.

He swore to God to serve the Polish nation — and agreed to be captured and imprisoned in Auschwitz