The Volunteer: One Man, Mission Impossible

“Sometimes it seems that nothing new can be revealed about the Holocaust, but Jack Fairweather’s book proves the opposite” — from a review in The Spectator.

In the summer of 1940, after the Nazis occupied Poland, Witold Pilecki—a member of the underground—received a mission to find out the fate of thousands of people in a new concentration camp at the border of the Reich. His job was to gather and transmit information to the outside world and organize an army for a rising. The camp was called Auschwitz. Today it seems unimaginable that until 1943 almost no one knew what place it truly was. Only after becoming a voluntary prisoner did Witold understand its real purpose. Over two and a half years, Pilecki built an underground network that secretly sent evidence of Nazi atrocities from inside the camp. In his reports, he urged the Allies to focus their efforts on liberating the camp—but outside, they did not fully understand him to the end: it was hard to believe such things. Then, through some miracle, Witold managed to get a radio transmitter and started duplicating messages by voice.

Later, Pilecki organized an escape. And—personally—he presented the so-called “Pilecki Report” to the military.

This is the first complete book about this remarkable story. It is based on declassified data, on family sources that had not been published before, and on exclusive interviews. As a result, it became a gripping account of heroism, resistance in the most horrifying circumstances, and one man’s attempt to change the course of history.

Would you have sacrificed yourself to save thousands of other people?—that is the question posed by the book of the year at Britain’s prestigious Costa Book Awards (2019), number 1 bestseller of The Sunday Times.