The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz

“Witold Pilecki volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz,” writes former war correspondent Fairweather in this immaculately detailed history, and rather than being heralded as a hero, he was tried, executed, and “effectively deleted from history” by his country. Fairweather mines letters, coded diaries, and personal interviews to tell the story of how Pilecki, a gentleman farmer and Polish cavalry officer, left his family, assumed a false identity, and handed himself over to the Gestapo for imprisonment at Auschwitz along with all the other military-age men in Warsaw. For two and a half years, he endured torture, starvation, and disease, witnessing Jewish families being led to the gas chambers and choking on the fumes from burning bodies, all the while risking his life to collect information on death tolls and building plans for death chambers and crematoriums that would be smuggled out by released upper-class prisoners. Pilecki was devastated when the Polish resistance and the Allies refused to believe that Auschwitz had become the center of the “final solution.” After escaping on his own, Pilecki returned to a Poland decimated by the fleeing Germans and seized by the encroaching Communist forces, which labeled him a traitor for opposing them and executed him. Fairweather tells this tragic tale in gripping fashion, bringing a new angle to the literature of the Holocaust. Illus. Agent: Larry Weissman, Larry Weissman Literary. (May)