Review: Gripping account of the hero who volunteered to go to Auschwitz

The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero who Infiltrated Auschwitz

Jack Fairweather, Custom House, €14

A Polish prisoner carefully checks there are no guards around before he enters one of the SS cloakrooms in Auschwitz. He takes out a hidden vial and quickly sprinkles its contents on the collars of those hated uniforms, before slipping out again. Within two weeks some of the Germans had come down with the typhoid that was wiping out so many of the prisoners.

That vial had contained a batch of infected lice, and the plan to deliver it was hatched under the direction of the subject of this biography. Few people outside his native Poland have heard of Witold Pilecki, but perhaps over time his name will be spoken of in the same sentences as Anne Frank, or Primo Levi, or the other chroniclers of the darkest days of the 20th century.

He was the Catholic farmer who purposely got himself arrested by the Germans in 1940 so he could be sent to Auschwitz. The resistance movement he was part of knew little about the camp other than its high death rate, so this father of two took on the mission to gather intelligence from within, and possibly organise a breakout.

He couldn't have imagined what he was letting himself in for. Even without the gas chambers and the 'Final Solution' (decided on in 1942), early Auschwitz was a brutal place. Prisoners were almost casually clubbed to death, with Jews singled out for particularly harsh treatment alongside lawyers, doctors, and other professionals. Hard labour and starvation rations added to the appalling conditions. The death rates meant a lot of bodies to be disposed of, and the ever-practical Germans had built an onsite crematorium for just such a purpose.

As Jack Fairweather's gripping account shows, none of this deflected Witold from his mission. Taken from Pilecki's own memoirs and accounts by those who knew him, a picture emerges of an incredible individual. A born leader with an eye for the greater good, in a place where prisoners were understandably prone to turning on each other, he weaponised kindness by helping to foster a culture of solidarity, working towards a more even distribution of food, and care for the weak.

Even after a year in that awful place, he worried that his family would find a way to get him out. As early as October 1940, he was able to get a reports about the camp to the resistance in Warsaw, who forwarded it to London. Pilecki was convinced that when those on the outside realised what was going on, an attack on Auschwitz would become a priority. He never knew why it didn't, and after two-and-a-half years, finally decided to break out and relate in person a story that now had additional chapters about huge numbers of Jews – including many children – being gassed.

Again, for all sorts of reasons, and to his extreme frustration, nobody acted. Myriad other war priorities, logistical difficulties, worries about anti-semitism in their own countries, and British attempts to keep a lid on the situation in Palestine, are among the reasons Fairweather gives for the Allies' lack of action on Auschwitz.

We also see how, at several stages in the evolution of Auschwitz, there seems to have been a failure to comprehend what was going on there. Even now, given all we know, the Nazis' actions are scarcely believable. Extreme brutality is one thing, but the type of carefully-planned, industrial genocide that went on at the death camp is still almost beyond our ken.

After his escape, Pilecki continued to resist, fighting in the Warsaw uprising, and after 'liberation' from the Germans, he switched to documenting atrocities by Stalin's forces. His luck eventually ran out and he was executed in Warsaw in 1948. His showtrial was even overseen by a fellow-Polish survivor of Auschwitz, who now sided with the communists.

In his wartime accounts – hidden by Poland's communist government until 1989 – Pilecki wrote of being with many of his friends as they faced death, as they spoke of their regrets about not doing more for other people in their lives.

“The only thing that remained after them on Earth, the only thing that was positive and had a lasting value, was what they could give of themselves to others.”

Hopefully, Wiltold Pilecki went to his end knowing he had more than given enough.