6: The Volunteer

A book by Jack Fairweather

There is a photograph on page 346 of Jack Fairweather’s book The Volunteer which shows Witold Pilecki, the subject of the tale, next to his wife Maria. The pair are sitting on the ground in some woods near Legionowo, a town 14 miles north of Warsaw, Poland’s capital, by the banks of the Vistula. They have just enjoyed a picnic. Witold is gazing into the distance wearing a white sleeveless shirt buttoned to the neck. Maria, in a blue summer dress adorned with butterflies, stares straight down the camera lens. The image is serene, bucolic. Taken in 2020, the photograph would likely garner a handful of likes on Instagram before disappearing into the scroll. But it was taken in May 1944. Witold was in his mid-40s, and a year or so earlier he had escaped from Auschwitz after two and a half years of internment.

Four years after the picture was taken, he would be executed as a traitor by Poland’s communist government. Records of his extraordinary heroism were sealed until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. And only with the success of Fairweather’s book—it won the Costa Book of the Year award for 2019—will his name have become familiar to many in the West, including me.

In the introduction to his superbly researched and grimly compelling book, Fairweather lays out the story in simple terms: “Witold Pilecki volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz.” It is an astonishing statement of fact. Why would anyone do such a thing, not least a happily married man with two young children? The answer becomes clear, though it will remain incomprehensible to many: Witold felt it was his duty. He was a key member of the Polish underground, and after a drip-feed of information about Auschwitz reached the resistance, it was decided someone was needed on the inside. So on September 21, 1940, after witnessing SS officers execute 11 of his fellow prisoners for sport, Witold passed through the gates bearing the infamous slogan: “Arbeit macht frei.”

Fairweather explains that “Witold entered Auschwitz before the Germans understood what the camp would become”. Upon his arrival it was a detention centre, but still horrifying. On the first morning of Witold’s internment, he and his fellow prisoners were told by Karl Fritzsch, the camp’s deputy commandant: “Your Poland is dead for ever, and now you are going to pay for your crimes through work. Look there, at the chimney. This is the crematory. Three thousand degrees of heat. The chimney is your only way to freedom.”

Over the best part of the next three years, Witold would witness and endure a multitude of Nazi atrocities and see the camp “transformed into a death factory before his eyes”. On each page, his mere survival seems impossible. He cheated death at every step, even managing to throw off bouts of pneumonia and typhus in the most barbaric conditions. And he fought back, building an underground network of saboteurs, and smuggling out reports in ingenious fashion.

“He needed to alert Warsaw to conditions in the camp and felt instinctively that others would react with the same horror he had. If [underground leader Stefan] Rowecki informed the British, he was sure they would retaliate.”

But they didn’t, for a multitude of reasons. Anti-semitism played a role, Fairweather concludes, as did the fact that the “onslaught” of the Blitz “left little time to consider the fate of those trapped on the continent”. There were also suspicions the reports could be part of the “game” Britain itself had played in the previous war of putting “out rumours of atrocities and horrors for various purposes”.

Most significantly, though, the “sheer magnitude and historic novelty of the crime” was too difficult for the Allies to comprehend, let alone believe. When the war ended, and the sickening realities of Auschwitz and the Holocaust were laid bare for all to see, Witold was not around to be vindicated. His unshakeable sense of duty had put him on a new path that would end in him, the most staunch of patriots, being executed as a traitor.

The closing pages of The Volunteer include the following heartbreaking admission from Maria, Witold’s wife, on behalf of her children: “We have been living in hope for a peaceful life together with him for a long time.” She wanted the life of the couple in the photograph. That, it proved, was too much to ask.