This is an extremely well researched story about an unknown Polish war hero, Witold Pilecki, during WWII. It gives great insight into exactly what was going through his mind and the ways in which he wanted to report and fight back. Pilecki was motivated by pure patriotism and a love for Poland, but this also brought with it a moral compass and the idea of him wanting to do what was right. As with all stories about this topic, the book can get very heavy, graphic, and hard to read. But I believe that is one reason it is important for everyone to do so. Highly, highly, recommend.

Review of The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather

Witold Pilecki was a patriotic Polish farmer in 1939, and an officer in the cavalry reserves. Pilecki lost most of his men in their first battle. He and another Polish officer, Jan Wlodarkiewicz, decided to form an underground resistance cell. The underground mainly did “hit-and-run” warfare against Soviet troops.

Pilecki and Wlodarkiewicz started out as good friends, but Pilecki started to distance himself when Wlodarkiewicz began incorporating anti-Semitic sentiment into his leadership of the resistance cell. Eventually Wlodarkiewicz proposed that Pilecki allow himself to be captured and sent to Auschwitz to start an underground within the camp and to report on conditions within the camp.

Pilecki accepted the dangerous assignment. If you have read horrific accounts of Auschwitz before, this is no different. Pilecki could have been killed at any time, just randomly. Upon arriving and disembarking from the train, soldiers were shoving the men with their gun butts, beating or shooting them if they didn’t move fast enough. One group of soldiers told a prisoner to run toward the fence. When he did, he was shot for trying to escape, while the soldiers laughed.

Then there was the gas chamber, crematorium, lice, typhus, starvation, lethal injections in the camp hospital, and more random killing from the guards. Some days prisoners’ numbers were read out and they were marched to a wall where they were shot.

I won’t say if Pilecki ever got out of Auschwitz alive, if he was able to send any messages to the underground outside the prison, or if he was able to establish a working underground resistance within the prison.
The Volunteer is a well researched, riveting read. Because of the content it may not be an easy read for some. I have read a few books about Auschwitz this year and the cumulative effect is causing warning bells inside my head to go off. I need to give this graphic history a break.

But if you haven’t reached your quota of explicit wartime violence, this is an important read to preserve history, and hopefully teach us which path of evil to avoid.

Witold Pilecki was a respected landowner turned resistance leader in Poland with the Nazi invasion in 1939. Before the Warsaw uprising, before the world was willing to hear the story of the Holocaust, Witold Pilecki bore witness to the development of Auschwitz and its evolution into the epicenter of the Nazi’s genocidal program. He entered Auschwitz as a prisoner deliberately, seeking to lead an internal resistance movement. From his earliest reports to the outside world, sent with trusted prisoners who were released, Pilecki advocated an Allied attack and focus on the destruction of Auschwitz as an important target both militarily and morally. As the world knows, the horrors of Auschwitz weren’t acknowledged or responded to by the Allies until far too late, years after Pilecki’s first communications. Along with two and a half years of careful communication with Resistance leaders attempting to make clear the true nature of Auschwitz, Pilecki led the underground resistance movement within Auschwitz. They attempted to protect prisoners who did not collaborate with the Germans, sabotaged German war efforts, and orchestrated deaths of German officers, informants, and collaborators in the camps.

Fairweather and his team did extensive research tracing Pilecki’s journey, as well as piecing together the events that resulted in the neglect of the end of Auschwitz as an explicit war aim by the Allies. Pilecki wrote hundreds of pages of reports and memoirs during and after his time in the camp, and Fairweather does an admirable job of balancing the stark facts and Pilecki’s continued trust in members of the resistance. While the thread of the story occasionally gets lost in the details, it is still a compelling book.

Final verdict: Highly recommend for anyone and everyone, with the caveat that (as you would expect) this can be a difficult book to read.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via Netgalley for review.

A fascinating true story of a little known hero of WWII. Witold Pilecki willfully went to Auschwitz to encourage prisoners and obtain information about the camp. He helped prisoners escape in order to send reports on the mass murder of innocent people. As part of an underground Polish resistance group he relentlessly tried to get the world to see what was happening to the Jewish people. This is an amazingly eye opening account of the tragedy at Auschwitz. Highly recommended!