The Volunteer
By Jack Fairweather Custom House, 528pp, £20/$28.99
Who on Earth would volunteer to enter Auschwitz? It sounds like suicide and indeed it could have been.
When the Polish officer Witold Pilecki accepted Nazi imprisonment in order to infiltrate the camp, it was not the infamous house of mass murder that it would become. Its nature then was cloaked in mystery. But how this devoted family man, dutiful soldier and undemonstrative but sincere believer would respond to its fantastic evil would come to define him.
Pilecki had served in the Polish armed forces, and had then helped to establish one of the first underground resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Poland. As Fairweather writes, this band of men knew direct resistance was beyond their means. What they could do was gather intelligence. It was to research the camp in which hundreds of Polish men were being interned, and to organise resistance there, that Pilecki volunteered to go.
Fairweather’s writing on the camp is vivid but not sensationalistic. Prisoners were allowed a hunk of bread and a cup of soup a day. “In the mornings, [Pilecki] woke to gnawing pangs of hunger and odd chills in his feet.” Guards were sadistic.
One night the starving prisoners were paraded under heavy rain because an inmate had gone missing. The man was found dead and dozens of his compatriots were to follow him, dying of pneumonia.
What was worse was that prisoners would turn on each other, selling out their fellow men for a slice of bread. This is all reminiscent of Tadeusz Borowski’s collection of short stories, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Pilecki was ill, disgusted and almost despairing. Still, he worked, making contacts, gathering reports and fostering an essential sense of solidarity among the Poles.
He formed the Military Organisation Union, an underground resistance movement within Auschwitz. It began to smuggle news to the outside world.
The camp had been horrifying since it had been created but the magnitude of its evil swelled. Fairweather guides the reader through its gradual transformation from a work camp in which guards thought nothing of killing prisoners, to a death camp in which mass murder was meticulously systematised.
Pilecki had seen Jews pouring into Auschwitz and somehow disappearing within its confines. (He knew that the Germans had used gas on Soviet prisoners.)
He sent messages to the Polish resistance and its Jewish Affairs Bureau, but, as with similar reports by the tireless investigator Jan Karski, the Allies thought them sensationalistic, and little was done as Auschwitz was turned from “a regional killing facility into the central hub of the Final Solution”.
Still Pilecki ploughed on.
A fascinating theme in The Volunteer is the moral turmoil good men face in staying decent in horrific circumstances. How much should one compromise one’s values for a higher cause? Władysław Dering as we know worked in the camp hospital and became complicit in the selection of prisoners for death, but in doing so he could select prisoners to live. Hero, villain or both?
Pilecki had no such dealings with the Devil but was haunted by the necessity of forbidding an insurrection. Such a strategy would have been suicide; and yet the alternative seemed to be waiting around to die.
Pilecki managed to escape from Auschwitz but failed to gain support for an attack on the camp. The resistance had other plans. Soon, Pilecki was fighting on the streets of Warsaw as the uprising briefly flourished, then faltered and ultimately sank into a mire of sadistic German reprisals.
Pilecki survived the war, only to see the Soviets overrun Poland and install a vicious communist government. Fatefully, he volunteered for one last mission, gathering evidence of Soviet atrocities and forming an anti-communist intelligence network. He was captured, tortured and sentenced to death before being executed in a Warsaw prison.
The communists, like the Nazis years before, took photos of the captive Pilecki. He was older, thinner and weaker, but seemed spiritually unbowed.
Fairweather’s book is meticulously researched and elegantly written. The reader will close it better informed about the nature of the Polish resistance and the world’s painful awakening to the true horror of the Holocaust.
It is a shame that Fairweather veers into a curious line of moralism in his epilogue, where he chides Pilecki, who “never came to see the Holocaust as the defining act of World War II” and “never let go of his Polishness and his sense of national struggle”.
Surely bearing witness to the murder of millions of Poles, the failed Nazi plan to enslave the population and the successful Soviet plan to Russify its politics might have had something to do with that.
Happily, Fairweather is balanced enough to add that Pilecki’s patriotism also “furnished him with a sense of service and a moral compass that sustained his mission in the camp”.
Pilecki’s story is one of individual courage and sacrifice but also collective virtue. The men in Auschwitz who maintained their optimism and selflessness in a camp designed to break their spirit and their faith were a burning candle in a coal-black time, and it is good that Fairweather has brought its light to us.
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