The true story of the resistance hero who infiltrated Auschwitz
My version: Paperback
Genre: Non Fiction, World War II
Publisher: W.H. Allen, Penguin Random House
First published: 2019
ISBN: 978-0-241-40290-0
Pages: 390, plus acknowledgements, characters, notes, select bibliography, index
Bought
From the cover:
Summer of 1940: Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground operative, accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands interned at a new concentration camp, report on Nazi crimes, raise a secret army and stage an uprising. The name of the camp – Auschwitz.
Over the next two and a half years, Pilecki forged an underground army within Auschwitz that sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying Nazi plans to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Pilecki realised 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 – but first he would have to escape from Auschwitz itself.
It really should be ‘the Polish resistance hero.’ He was a proud Polishman, a proud Polish patriot.
He was in Auschwitz before it became the death camp, the killing machine (though others were actually worse, in that they only killed and were shut down when their work was done, they didn’t masquerade as work camps), and saw it develop, and enlarge.
His story is tragic. That it was necessary to do this, that no fucker really believed him at first, that no fucker did anything about it – even though it was possible to have done something, like bomb the place. No matter what excuses the Allies made, it was possible to do. That Poland fell under Stalin and Communisms influence, control and mass murder. Having devoted yourself so much and suffered so much for a cause you believed and a country you were willing to put your life in danger for, to then be shot as a ‘traitor’ immediately after the war, is heartbreaking.
By reading this, maybe, just maybe, a part of his mission has succeeded. No, he did not fail. He was betrayed by the West, then by his own country, but he succeeded in the end. Succeded in getting the word out. Even to us, even now.
Couldn't I Just Tell You 