WITOLD PILECKI

Intro: He swore to God to serve the Polish nation – and agreed to be captured and imprisoned in Auschwitz

IN 1940, who in their rightful mind would have volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz? Witold Pilecki, the extraordinary hero of this most amazing book, did exactly that. “You must be nuts!” a fellow prisoner told him. But contrary to initial thoughts that he must have been mad or stupid, 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 of being in a hellish place when a man was beaten to death before his eyes. The SS were in charge, but the day-to-day running of the camp was in the hands of the kapos, a body of inmates who were given power over their fellow prisoners. A despicable method used by one of these men, named Ernst Krankemann, was to harness a group of 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 gulag 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 and heinous 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 know 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.

– The Volunteer is published by W.H. Allen, 528pp