Witold Pilecki "The Auschwitz Volunteer"

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"The Auschwitz Volunteer" is the single most extraordinary tale of heroism I have ever read. Next to what Witold Pilecki voluntarily endured at Auschwitz, Sir Ernest Shackleton, the famously gritty Antarctic explorer, was enjoying a day at the beach.

To say that Witold Pilecki was a "man's man" is to understate the case considerably. We don't have words to adequately convey the kind of heroism Pilecki displayed. Language is a common possession and Pilecki was entirely uncommon. Witold Pilecki is one of the greatest heroes our species has produced. You're going to come away from this book wondering why Hollywood has not yet celebrated him. In fact that is a very good question to ask, and the answer reveals much about how stereotypes of Brute Polaks have been used to distort history.

"The Auschwitz Volunteer" belongs on the very short shelf of the classics of Holocaust literature, next to Anne Frank's "Diary of a Young Girl," Elie Wiesel's "Night," Primo Levi's "The Drowned and the Saved" and Tadeusz Borowski's "This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen." Most people, including most teaching courses on the Holocaust at US universities, have never heard of Witold Pilecki. This is a scandal, one Polonia is duty-bound to correct. "The Auschwitz Volunteer" must be on the core syllabus of Holocaust study.

Many readers who should read this book will shrink from it. I want to assure readers that, the entire time you are reading, you know you are in the hands of a heroically good man who endured everything he endured because he was committed to a higher cause: serving humanity, his country, and his God. Indeed, in describing events in 1943, when he had been in Auschwitz since 1940, Pilecki wrote, "Above all, I was a believer." Pilecki described how his belief in God, and his commitment to service to Poland, got him through. Pilecki is proof that as low as humanity has sunk, the light shone in the darkness. When humanity scoured the depths of depravity, it also reached the heights of heroism. In this, Witold Pilecki is like Jan Karski, Maximilian Kolbe, Irena Sendler and thousands of other heroes, who, knowing the risk they were undertaking, defied Nazism.

Captain Witold Pilecki was a forty-something officer in the underground Polish resistance movement during World War II. He was in what would eventually coalesce into the Armia Krajowa, or Home Army. Pilecki came from a long history of Polish resistance: his grandfather had been exiled to Siberia, and Pilecki formed resistance groups as a youth, and fought against the Russians in 1920, being twice decorated. He fought again when the German Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and again against the Russian Soviets when they invaded Poland on September 17, 1939. When open, armed struggle became impossible, Pilecki co-founded a group that eventually would become part of the Home Army.

In 1940, Pilecki volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz. He did so to serve his country, and humanity. Pilecki was a prisoner in Auschwitz from 1940-43. The entire time he was there, he organized prisoners, gathered information, and planned to work for the Nazi defeat.

Pilecki's report is an eyewitness, journalistic account of everyday life in a concentration camp. The material is highly disturbing, of course, but it is also fascinating. Pilecki describes the tortures the Nazis and their minions resorted to, but he also describes moments when he felt happy because he was able to overcome some obstacle, including the spiritual obstacle of the temptation to succumb to despair. These moments truly are examples of the arguments about human nature that Viktor Frankl, another Auschwitz prisoner, made in his classic, "Man's Search for Meaning."

One objective fact follows another in Pilecki's account: accounts of torture and mass murder, how Auschwitz handled its mail, sewerage, and lice infestations. How male barbers reacted to shaving the bodies of women. How prisoners being sent to their deaths greeted their former comrades they passed on the way to execution.

Pilecki's report was written in 1945, before the world had assimilated the Holocaust, before that word was even widely used, before accurate tallies of the dead had been drawn up, before powerful forces began to dictate the approved World War II narrative. His report was written for military and humanitarian purposes. His style is journalistic. He strives to provide the facts, in an unemotional manner.

His humanity seeps through nevertheless. As Pilecki himself put it, "They have told me, 'The more you stick to the bare facts, the more valuable it all will be.' Well, here I go. But we were not made of stone. It sometimes seemed as if even a stone would have broken out in a sweat."

The book is not crafted to provide the rising suspense, climax, and denouement one gets from reading a modern American bestseller. There is no Hollywood ending.

All these features of Pilecki's report, which some will assess as drawbacks, are actually the great strengths of the book. Pilecki's writing is utterly raw. He writes as someone who is confronted with atrocity first-hand would write, before he had been to grief counseling, before he had been through the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder workshop, before a committee of academics went over his document with a fine-toothed comb in order to make sure that his treatment of demographics and statistics and religions and ethnicities meets the current guidelines of Political Correctness. This is what the Holocaust looked like to an Auschwitz prisoner, on the ground, watching it happen. This is not Hollywood's or even American academia's Holocaust.

Jarek Garlinski's translation of Pilecki's work is peerless. The language is smooth and appropriately idiomatic. Garlinski is himself the son of an Auschwitz survivor. The book contains much supportive material to aid the reader. There are maps, many photographs of Pilecki and his family before, during and after the war, his underground comrades, his fellow prisoners and his Nazi tormentors, and Auschwitz. There are introductions that walk the reader through Pilecki's life story, and several appendices and an excellent index. Aquila Polonica has every reason to feel very, very proud of this book, of its substance, its style, and its unique importance.

Given how important Pilecki is, one must ask, why is he unknown? I think much of the answer can be found in my own book on the importance of the Brute Polak stereotype in Western culture.