THE VOLUNTEER
THE TRUE STORY OF THE RESISTANCE HERO WHO INFILTRATED AUSCHWITZ
Jack Fairweather, a former Daily
Telegraph journalist and war correspondent for the Washington
Post, has unearthed remarkable, long-neglected material about Auschwitz and tells the story of Witold Pilecki, a Polish officer and member of the resistance, who willingly got himself arrested in September 1940 in order to be incarcerated in the camp to gather first-hand intelligence as to what was going on there. Caroline Moorehead in the
Spectator admired his meticulous research. ‘If it sometimes seems as though there is nothing left to uncover about the Holocaust, Fairweather’s gripping book proves otherwise,’ she wrote.
The book is ‘a searing account of daily life inside Auschwitz’, Giles Milton warned in the Sunday Times. ‘It is not for the faint-hearted ... there is scarcely a page without some shudder-inducing atrocity.’
Pilecki’s story ‘reveals a darker strand to what we already know about the Holocaust’, Milton continued, ‘exposing serious shortcomings in the responses of British and American governments’. Even when Pilecki revealed that Auschwitz had become a place of mass extermination, the Allies did
nothing. The British concluded that bombing the camp, theoretically to facilitate escape for some, would be a wasteful diversion of resources.
‘If the railway lines to Auschwitz had been destroyed in early 1943 it could have stopped the arrival of a further 800,000 Jews who were to perish there over the next two years,’ Robbie Millen claimed in the Times. It had become the ‘epicentre of a vast, mechanised genocide unparalleled in history’. As Milton conceded, no one could comprehend ‘the sheer magnitude and historic novelty of the crime’.
‘Pilecki’s eventual escape is the stuff of high drama and Fairweather tells it with panache ... a fitting memorial to one of Poland’s greatest war heroes,’ Milton enthused.