Holocaust hero story is a tale for our times
Jack Fairweather, a former Telegraph journalist, wins Costa Book of the Year for an ‘essential’ biography
Despite our grim fascination with the Holocaust, very few Anglophone readers are familiar with the story of Witold Pilecki, the Polish partisan who wangled his way into Auschwitz in order to report the camp’s horrors to the outside world. Now we can read about him in The Volunteer, a biography by the former Telegraph journalist Jack Fairweather (who was bureau chief in Baghdad), which has just been named the Costa Book of the Year.
We are told that the judges were unanimous in their choice – and, really, how could it have been otherwise? There was never much chance that there would be a split award à la the recent Booker Prize.
As we mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, recognition of the brilliance of Fairweather’s book seems not just timely but essential.
Of the other shortlisted authors, the comic novelist Jonathan Coe is the biggest name, but there would have been something perversely parochial in awarding the prize to his satirical take on Brexit Britain, Middle England.
Sara Collins’s debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, about an ex-slave on trial for murder in Georgian England, is a livelier read than Coe’s.
I was also glad to see recognition for the Hong Kong-born Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche, a collection of poems that manages to be both ingenious and passionate, and Jasbinder Bilan’s Asha & the Spirit Bird, a heartfelt and mystical children’s adventure story.
But the award rightly goes to Fairweather. Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark turned Oskar Schindler into a household name more than a decade after his death. One suspects Fairweather’s impeccable book will start a similar process for Pilecki, and, like Keneally’s book, will come to be regarded as a modern classic.
Pilecki was one of those people for whom the word “hero” seems inadequate. He volunteered to get himself arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where he masterminded a number of escapes and other schemes to get the truth about what was happening in the camp out to the wider world.
At one stage, he even sent word to the Allies begging them to bomb the camp rather than prolong the inmates’ suffering, although his pleas went unanswered. He survived the war only to be executed by Poland’s Communist government in 1948. It’s a gift of a story for any writer but Fairweather’s disciplined and even sometimes wryly comic prose does it full justice. His brilliance in bringing Pilecki gloriously to life and rescuing this almost unparalleled act of courage from oblivion feels like one more small victory against the 20th century’s most evil regimes.
The Volunteer is published by Penguin.
‘One suspects that “The Volunteer” will turn Witold Pilecki into a household name’