posted on 26 Nov 2020

The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather

Jack Fairweather, a British writer and journalist, a former war correspondent, is a new name to me. Recently I read his latest book The Volunteer which tells the story of Witold Pilecki, anti-Nazi, resister, and hero of the Polish underground during the Second World War. Pilecki belongs to a very select band indeed: not only did he escape from Auschwitz, he also infiltrated the camp, volunteering to be captured so that he could lead an underground mission there, uncover conditions in the camp and establish a resistance cell inside it.

Believe me, this is not an easy book to read, as one might imagine. It tells of unspeakable, unimaginable cruelty and brutality. But many have remarked that it is also a beacon of hope: it may tell us almost more than we can bear about the worst that humankind is capable of, but it also tells us about the best, the most courageous and the most selfless, exemplary acts of heroism. Even so, the story is more complex than this – more morally complex, I mean – and is not, and cannot be, the ultimately consoling account of the triumph of good over evil, of hope over despair, that we might wish for.

As Poland prepares for Nazi invasion, its underground cells are mobilising for resistance. Pilecki, a gentleman-farmer and former cavalry officer volunteered for a number of missions but then accepted what I suppose might be seen as the mission of a lifetime: engineering his own capture by the Germans so that he would be deported to the newly established Auschwitz. And it is here, right from the outset, that the moral ambivalence begins, for to be strictly accurate he didn't volunteer; rather, he was ‘volunteered’ by another more nationalist, right-wing commander who believed that the resistance cell they had founded together should have a clear Polish Catholic position and with whom as a consequence he had had a falling out.

The central argument of the book is that it wasn’t until 1942 – and then only unwillingly – that the central role Auschwitz had come to play in the extermination of European Jews was recognised by the allies. But abominations on a truly appalling scale sometimes defy understanding precisely because they lie so far beyond accepted norms. Our instinct is to find a rationale for such events that has some reference to what we already know – and even those, such as Pilecki, who witnessed Auschwitz at first hand and returned to tell of it, had seen nothing remotely like this before. David Rousset, a French Trotskyist and resistance fighter who was himself in Auschwitz was the first to describe what he termed l’univers concentrationnaire – “a world set apart, utterly segregated, a strange kingdom with its own peculiar fatality”. These were hells whose purpose only slowly became recognised.

Astonishingly, once inside the camp, Pilecki did establish a resistance cell that eventually numbered around a thousand prisoners. He documented conditions – the camp system, the torture, the calculated starvation, the death-by-labour, the murders, the gradual evolution of Auschwitz from concentration camp to an expanding complex dedicated to the industrialised extermination of Jewish men, women and children. He wrote and smuggled out via escapees and prisoners released in the early days of the camp around a dozen reports which made their way not just to resistance leaders in Warsaw but in extraordinary journeys which in some cases took a year or more to the allied leadership. We the prisoners, these reports told the allies, call on you to bomb Auschwitz and halt the Nazis’ genocide; your intervention may enable some of us to escape; it will almost certainly kill a greater number of us, but this is a price worth paying for here our death is in any case certain and guaranteed.

Initially, these reports were not believed; the allied leadership felt they defied credibility. There was, however, also a school of thought that resisted naming the genocide and resisted intervening to save Jewish people on the grounds that this would detract from overall war aims and would – through its apparent ‘favouritism’ – prompt anti-semitism at home, both in England and America.

The Volunteer is a masterpiece of sustained research and narrative story-telling, managing to convey both the bigger geo-political picture – the relationship between the closed world of the concentration camp and the wider events of the war – and smaller incidents and vignettes that have their own shocking power within the overall narrative. I’ll give just one example. One of Pilecki’s reports was smuggled out of Auschwitz by an escapee called Kazimierz Piechowski, who escaped in an SS car and dressed in SS uniform. He died on the 15th December 2017, just two years short of his hundredth birthday. The prisoner who escaped with him, however, Stanislaw Jaster, did not survive the war: he was executed by the Polish underground in 1943, charged with being an informer. There is apparently no evidence now surviving to confirm this charge.

And what happened to Witold Pilecki? An internet search will readily answer the question, but I hope you’ll resist that urge and read Fairweather’s book in order to find out. I can’t possibly do justice to it in this short review. And even if I could write about it at greater length I am overwhelmingly aware that I am not equipped to do so. It isn’t a challenge I could rise to. If you have read and enjoyed any of Anthony Beevor’s magisterial accounts of the military history of the Second World War – Stalingrad, or Berlin: The Downfall or D-Day – then Jack Fairweather’s The Volunteer is a feat of popular history writing of a similar scale and quality. An extraordinary book and an extraordinary story.

 

Alun Severn

November 2020