Story of Auschwitz hero is Costa winner

THE real-life story of a resistance fighter who smuggled evidence of Nazi atrocities out of Auschwitz was last night named this year’s Costa Book Award winner.

Former war reporter Jack Fairweather’s The Volunteer is the biography of Witold Pilecki, a Pole who survived the death camp only to be executed by the country’s new communist rulers.

Fairweather, 41, was named winner of the £30,000 prize the day after Holocaust Memorial Day, although judges insisted that had no bearing on their decision.

Channel 5 newsreader and former

BBC presenter Sian Williams, who chaired the judging panel, said The Volunteer gives hope to those who want to speak out in a time when ‘hate speech is on the rise, hate crime is on the rise and antiSemitism is on the rise’.

It is ‘ as pacy as any thriller or work of fiction but it’s not fiction, it’s horrific fact’, she added.

Fairweather’s book tells how Pilecki, a member of f the Warsaw resistance, volunteered to be arrested and sent to Auschwitz before he knew it was an extermination camp.

From the inside, he built his own resistance group and passed information to the Allies. The book beat four others on the s shortlist, including Jonathan Coe’s Middle England and The Confessions Of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins.

Fairweather said he hoped The Volunteer was a ‘message for our times’ adding that he had ‘recognised a v voice’ in Witold Pilecki.

‘I saw in him something of a war reporter who felt disappointed and bitter that what he was saying wasn’t being heard,’ he said.