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ATEMUSEUM70 WORLD WAR II
NOTES FROM THE
UNDERGROUND
REVIEWS BOOKS
Voluntarily arrested in a
Nazi round-up, Polish
resistance member Witold
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little-known work camp.THE VOLUNTEER
One Man, an
Underground Army,
and the Secret
Mission to Destroy
Auschwitz
By Jack
Fairweather. 528
pp. HarperCollins,- $28.99.
IN 1940, POLISH underground leader Witold
Pilecki did the unthinkable: he willingly
arranged to be imprisoned in Auschwitz, the
labor complex that swelled into Nazi Germa-
ny’s largest concentration and death camp.
Author Jack Fairweather uses diaries, let-
ters, and more to piece together the little-
known story of Pilecki, a cavalry officer from
small-town gentry who joins his country’s
resistance when Nazi Germany invades
Poland. Though respected within the move-
ment, Pilecki makes an enemy with compet-
ing political priorities; this rival proposes to
top brass that Pilecki infiltrate a new prison
camp in the town of Oświęcim, rumored to be
filled with captive Poles. Pilecki puts on a
brave face and accepts the mission, orches-
trating his own arrest with few clues to thehorrors awaiting him beyond barbed wires.
When Pilecki arrives at Auschwitz in Sep-
tember 1940, the camp’s infamous gas cham-
bers are still neither conceived nor built, nor
is the neighboring death camp at Birkenau.
Still, with daily beatings and little food, he
must struggle to keep both himself and his
burgeoning network of Polish resistance cells
within the camp alive. Fairweather doesn’t
skimp on the daily brutality of Auschwitz;
Pilecki only survives at all thanks to work
assignments in the camp’s hospital and its
woodshop, which shield him from hard labor.
From these protected perches, he observes
the Nazis refining Zyklon B, ramping up liqui-
dations, cracking crematorium chimneys
from overuse, and congratulating themselves
on their efficiency as mass murderers.