If historical reputations were based on merit, Witold Pilecki would be a household name. Yet, the Polish Army captain who volunteered to be sent to Auschwitz in 1940, to report on the Germans' nefarious activities in the camp, is little known outside Poland.
This state of affairs should change with the publication of Jack Fairweather's The Volunteer. Fairweather, a journalist, has produced a lively and engaging biography of Pilecki, which draws heavily on contemporary accounts left by the subject himself.
Pilecki's story is certainly remarkable. In the autumn of 1940, he volunteered to be captured by the Germans in Warsaw, in the expectation that he would be sent to the new concentration camp at Auschwitz, from where he would report back to the Polish underground. At Auschwitz he witnessed the beginning of a genocide; a place so brutally run that thousands of Polish prisoners were dying of disease, maltreatment and overwork every month.
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