The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery

By Captain Witold Pilecki - Translated by Jarek Garlinski - Introduction by Norman Davies - Foreword ...

Soldier, Patriot¿Husband, Father¿HeroCaptain Witold Pilecki¿the only man who volunteered to be captured and imprisoned in Auschwitz to bring out the story of the camp.September 1940. With calm deliberation, Polish Army officer Witold Pilecki walked into a Nazi German street round-up in Warsaw¿and became Auschwitz Prisoner No. 4859.Pilecki had volunteered for a potentially suicidal secret undercover mission for the Polish Underground: smuggle out intelligence about this new German concentration camp, and build a resistance organization among the prisoners.Barely surviving nearly three years of hunger, disease and brutality, Pilecki accomplished his mission before escaping in April 1943.His clandestine intelligence reports from Auschwitz, received by the Allies beginning in 1941, were among the earliest, including the full horrors of daily life inside the camp, the killing of Soviet soldiers taken as prisoners of war, the building of the gas chambers and mass extermination of the Jews brought to the camp.Pilecki¿s most comprehensive report on Auschwitz, written for his Polish Army superiors in 1945, is being published here in English for the first time.¿A shining example of heroism that transcends religion, race and time.¿¿ Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland