The Volunteer

The True Story of the Resistance Hero who Infiltrated Auschwitz

Jack Fairweather

• Editore: Custom House
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780062561428
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: 20th Century History

COSTA BOOK AWARD WINNER: BOOK OF THE YEAR • #1 SUNDAY TIMES (UK) BESTSELLER

"Superbly written and breathtakingly researched, The Volunteer smuggles us into Auschwitz and shows us—as if watching a movie—the story of a Polish agent who infiltrated the infamous camp, organized a rebellion, and then snuck back out.... Fairweather has dug up a story of incalculable value and delivered it to us in the most compelling prose I have read in a long time." —Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and Tribe

The incredible true story of a Polish resistance fighter's infiltration of Auschwitz to sabotage the camp from within, and his death-defying attempt to warn the Allies about the Nazis' plans for a "Final Solution" before it was too late.

To uncover the fate of the thousands being interred at a mysterious Nazi camp on the border of the Reich, a thirty-nine-year-old Polish resistance fighter named Witold Pilecki volunteered for an audacious mission: assume a fake identity, intentionally get captured and sent to the new camp, and then report back to the underground on what had happened to his compatriots there. But gathering information was not his only task: he was to execute an attack from inside—where the Germans would least expect it.

The name of the camp was Auschwitz.

Over the next two and half years, Pilecki forged an underground army within Auschwitz that sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi informants and officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying truth that the camp was to become the epicenter of Nazi plans to exterminate Europe's Jews, Pilecki realized he would have to risk his men, his life, and his family to warn the West before all was lost. To do so, meant attempting the impossible—an escape from Auschwitz itself.

Completely erased from the historical record by Poland's post-war Communist government, Pilecki remains almost unknown to the world. Now, with exclusive access to previously hidden diaries, family and camp survivor accounts, and recently declassified files, Jack Fairweather offers an unflinching portrayal of survival, revenge and betrayal in mankind's darkest hour. And in uncovering the tragic outcome of Pilecki's mission, he reveals that its ultimate defeat originated not in Auschwitz or Berlin, but in London and Washington.

I

Chapter 1

Invasion

KRUPA, EASTERN POLAND

AUGUST 26, 1939

Witold stood on the manor house steps and watched the car kick up a trail of dust as it drove down the lime tree avenue toward the yard and came to a stop in a white cloud beside the gnarled chestnut. The summer had been so dry that the peasants talked about pouring water on the grave of a drowned man, or harnessing a maiden to the plow to make it rain—such were the customs of the Kresy, Poland’s eastern borderlands. A vast electrical storm had finally come only to flatten what was left of the harvest and lift the storks’ nests off their posts. But that August Witold wasn’t worrying about grain for the winter.¹

The radio waves crackled with news of German troops massing on the border and Adolf Hitler’s threat to reclaim territory ceded to Poland at the end of World War I. Hitler believed the German people were locked in a brutal contest for resources with other races. It was only by the “annihilation of Poland and its vital forces,” he had told officers at his mountain retreat in Obersalzburg on August 22, that the German race could expand. The next day Hitler signed a secret nonaggression pact with Josef Stalin that granted Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union and most of Poland to Germany. If the Germans succeeded in their plans, Witold’s home and his land would be taken and Poland reduced to a vassal state or destroyed entirely.²

A soldier stepped out of the dusty car with orders for Witold to gather his men. Poland had ordered a mass mobilization of half a million reservists. Witold, a second lieutenant in the cavalry reserves and member of the local gentry, had forty-eight hours to deliver his unit to the barracks in the nearby town of Lida for loading onto troop transports bound west. He had done his best to train ninety volunteers through the summer, but most of his men were peasants who had never seen action or fired a gun in anger. Several didn’t own horses and planned to fight the Germans on bicycle. At least Witold had been able to arm them with Lebel 8 mm bolt-action carbines.³

Witold hurried into his uniform and riding boots and grabbed his Vis handgun from a pail in the old smoke room, where he’d hidden it after catching his eight-year-old son, Andrzej, waving it at his little sister earlier in the summer. His wife, Maria, had taken the children to visit her mother near Warsaw. He’d need to summon them home. They’d be safer in the east away from Hitler’s line of attack.⁴

Witold heard the stable boy readying his favorite horse, Bajka, in the yard and took a moment to adjust his khaki uniform in one of the mirrors that hung in the hallway beside the faded prints depicting the glorious but doomed uprisings his ancestors had fought in. He was thirty-eight years old, of medium build and handsome in an understated way, with pale blue eyes, dark blond hair brushed back from his high forehead, and a set to his lips that gave him a constant half smile. Noting his reserve and capacity to listen, people sometimes mistook him for a priest or a well-meaning bureaucrat. He could be warm and effusive, but more often gave the impression of holding something back. He held exacting standards for himself and could be demanding of others, but he never pushed too far. He trusted people, and his quiet confidence inspired others to place their trust in him.⁵

Map of Sukurcze from Witold’s sister’s memoir.
Courtesy of PMA-B.

Witold Pilecki and a friend in Sukurcze, c. 1930.
Courtesy of the Pilecki family.

As a young man he’d wanted to be an artist and had studied painting at university in the city of Wilno, only to abandon his schooling in the tumultuous years after World War I. Poland declared independence in 1918 out of the wreckage of the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires but was almost immediately invaded by Soviet Russia. Witold skirmished against the Bolsheviks with his scout troop and fought on the streets of Wilno. In the heady days that followed victory, Witold didn’t feel like picking up his paintbrushes. He clerked for a while at a military supply depot and a farmers’ union. Then in 1924 his father fell ill and he was honor bound to take on his family’s dilapidated estate, Sukurcze, with its crumbling manor house, overgrown orchards, and 550 acres of rolling wheat fields.⁶

Suddenly, Witold found himself the steward of the local community. Peasants from the local village of Krupa worked his fields and sought his advice on how to develop their own land. He set up a dairy cooperative to earn them better prices, and, after spending a large chunk of his inheritance on his prized Arabian mare, founded the local reserve unit. He met his wife, Maria, in 1927 while painting scenery for a play in Krupa’s new schoolhouse and courted her with bunches of lilac flowers delivered through her bedroom window. They married in 1931, and within a year their son, Andrzej, was born, followed twelve months later by Zofia, their daughter. Fatherhood brought out Witold’s caring side. He tended to the children when Maria was bedridden after Zofia’s birth and taught them to ride and to swim in the pond beside the house. In the evenings, they staged little plays for Maria when she came home from work.⁷

Witold and Maria shortly after their wedding, c. 1931.
Courtesy of the Pilecki family.

But his quiet home life was not cut off from the political currents sweeping the country in the 1930s, and Witold worried. Poland had been one of the most pluralistic and tolerant societies in Europe for much of its thousand-year history. However, the country that had reemerged in 1918 after 123 years of partition had struggled to forge an identity. Nationalists and church leaders called for an increasingly narrow definition of Polishness based on ethnicity and Catholicism. Groups advocating greater rights for Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities were broken up and suppressed, while Jews—who comprised around a tenth of Poland’s prewar population—were labeled economic competitors, discriminated against in education and business, and pressured to emigrate. Some nationalists took matters into their own hands, enforced boycotts of Jewish shops, and attacked synagogues. Thugs in Witold’s hometown, Lida, had smashed up a Jewish confectionary and a lawyer’s office. The main square was filled with shuttered shops belonging to Jews who had fled the country.⁸

Witold, Maria, Andrzej, and Zofia, c. 1935.
Courtesy of the Pilecki family.

Witold disliked politics and the way politicians exploited differences. His family stood for the old order, when Poland had been independent and a beacon of culture. That said, he was a man of his time and social class. He likely held a paternal view toward the local Polish and Belarusian peasants and shared in some of the prevailing anti-Semitic views. But ultimately his sense of patriotism extended to any group or ethnicity that took up Poland’s cause. They would all need to unite now to repel the Nazi threat.⁹

***

Once mounted on his horse, it took Witold a breathless prayer to get to Krupa a mile away, where he likely called Maria from one of the few houses to have a telephone. Next he rode to the training ground beside the manor to assemble his men and gather supplies. Witold received ammunition and emergency rations from the regimental headquarters in Lida but had to arrange the remaining provisions from the community: bread, groats, sausages, lard, potatoes, onions, canned coffee, flour, dried herbs, vinegar, and salt. The horses needed the best part of 30 kilograms of oats a week. Not everyone in the village was happy to contribute, hardly having enough for themselves, and it was a long day in the sweltering heat to load the wagons in the manor courtyard.¹⁰

Witold had offered up the manor as a billet for officers and may have been camping with his men. At any rate, he wasn’t at home when Maria and the children finally arrived the following evening, hot and bedraggled, to find soldiers dozing in their beds. She was annoyed, to put it mildly. It had been a long journey. The train was so packed that infants had been passed into the carriages through the windows, and they had stopped constantly to make way for military traffic. Witold was promptly summoned from the field and had to ask the men to leave.¹¹

Maria was still upset when she woke up to the news that some peasants had broken into one of the baggage trains and stolen some supplies. But she put on one of Witold’s favorite dresses for the send-off in Krupa, and she made sure Andrzej and Zofia were in their Sunday best. The children of the village gathered outside the school, and Krupa’s single street was packed with well-wishers waving flags or handkerchiefs. A cheer went up as Witold led his column of horsemen down the street. He was dressed in a khaki uniform, with his pistol and saber strapped to his waist.¹²

Witold passed his family without looking down, but as soon as the column rode by and the crowd started to disperse he came galloping back, his face flushed, and stopped before them. He was leaving Maria with only his sister and old Józefa, the chain-smoking housekeeper, for protection. The Germans had been notorious in the last war for carrying out atrocities against civilians. He hugged and kissed the children. Maria, her unruly brown hair done up and lipstick on, was trying not to cry.¹³

“I will be back in two weeks,” he told them. He could hardly say that in riding off on horseback to confront the most powerful military machine in Europe, he would be lucky to survive the next few days. Hitler commanded an army of 3.7 million men, almost twice the number of Poland’s, with two thousand more tanks and almost ten times the number of fighter planes and bombers. Furthermore, no natural features separated the two countries along their shared border that ran for a thousand miles, from the Tatra Mountains in the south to the Baltic coast in the north. Poland’s best hope lay in holding out long enough for its allies, the British and French, to attack from the west and expose Germany to a war on two fronts.¹⁴

Witold on his horse Bajka on parade, c. 1930s.
Courtesy of the Pilecki family.

Witold next visited his parents’ grave near the house. His father had died years earlier, but he had buried his mother only a few months before. Witold tied his...