Voluntary Prisoner. The Story of a Man Who Went to Auschwitz

«...Sometimes it seems that nothing new can be revealed about the Holocaust, but Jack Fairweather's book proves otherwise» — from a review in The Spectator. In the summer of 1940, after the Nazis occupied Poland, underground participant Witold Pilecki was tasked with discovering the fate of thousands of people in a new concentration camp on the Reich's border. His mission was to collect and transmit information to the outside world and to organize an army for an uprising. The camp was called Auschwitz. It now seems inconceivable that until 1943 almost no one knew what this place was really like. Only by becoming a voluntary prisoner did Witold understand its true purpose. Over two and a half years, Pilecki created an underground network that secretly transmitted accounts of Nazi atrocities from the camp. In his reports, he urged the Allies to focus on liberating the camp, but on the outside they did not fully understand him: it was hard to believe such a thing. Then, by some miracle, Witold assembled a radio transmitter and began to duplicate messages vocally. Later, Pilecki organized an escape. He personally presented what was called the «Pilecki Report» to the military.