The Resistance Hero Who Infiltrated Auschwitz

A book review by Dr Norman Simms

Jack Fairweather, The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero Who Infiltrated Auschwitz.
London: W.H .Allen, 2019; pbk, Penguin, 2020. xix-504 pp. Profusely illustrated with black-and-white maps, drawings and photographs.

This is the story of Witold Pilecki. He was not a Jew and his story becomes one about the Holocaust only as he realizes that by 1942 the Germans had one aim in the Second World War and that was to exterminate the Jews throughout Europe. He volunteers to go into Auschwitz in order to organize a resistance movement among the Polish prisoners, sees the transformation of the concentration camp into an extermination camp, and the shift from Polish and other resistance fighters, Russian POWs and other political inmates to an almost totally Jewish intake of men, women and children to be gassed and cremated.

His original mission was to enlist some of his comrades from various resistance groups and political parties who were opposed to the Nazi and Soviet occupation of Poland. Then gradually, as the Final Solution took shape, he added new aims to his duties. He was to send reports back to Warsaw on what he saw happening, and these reports were to be passed on to the Polish government in exile in London, which was then to seek support from the Allies in aiding the resistance movement. Then these goals changed. At first, he was frustrated by the failure of the leaders of the Polish underground to understand the nature of Nazi cruelty and the large number of murders they were carrying out in Auschwitz.

When he managed to return to Warsaw to argue the case with his comrades, he found them not only incredulous and unwilling to accept that the nature of the war itself was changing. His own informants, as well as his close listening to radio broadcasts from around Europe and his reading of newspapers from London, made him see that the Allies were unable and increasingly unwilling to act on the enormity of the crimes being carried out, especially when the Americans, French and British commanders were being called on to retaliate and take revenge on German and occupied cities for what the Nazis were doing to the Jews.

Moreover, the Russians—that is, Joseph Stalin—had his own plan to seize control of Poland, destroy its bourgeois infrastructure, murder its intellectuals and spiritual leaders, and rule it as a vassal state. Even when the Soviet armies were standing across the Vistula and the Polish patriots came out in an uprising, Stalin held his troops back and let the Germans destroy the city and kill as many civilians as possible. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill made little complaining noises and Stalin made a few token acts, but basically no one was willing to rescue Poland, just as they had no intention of stopping the genocidal murder of millions of Jews. In other words, no one in the world was willing to listen to Witold Pilecki.

Jack Fairweather, a former war correspondent, author of several other books about his experiences in combat zones. Worked with a research team to gather together the information needed to put together The Volunteer. He claims that everything in his biography of Witold Pilecki is based on published evidence, private letters and other documents, interviews with surviving family members and wartime friends, as well as people who knew and collaborated with the resistance hero: and he gives his sources in more than fifty pages of notes. Her also adds a small section listing and describing the main figures who are mentioned in the book and provides an index to aid students seeking to trace out patterns of action, places and ideas, There is also a Selective Bibliography of nearly sixty pages. In brief, this is a serious book to be reckoned with.

And well it should be. Fairweather gives his personal motivation for writing The Volunteer:

I also felt personally challenged by the story—I was the same age as Witold when the war began. I also had a young family, and a home. What would make Witiold risk everything on such a mission and why did his act of volunteering speak so powerfully to me? I recognized in Witold the same restlessness that had led me to war and troubled me ever since. What could Witold teach me about my own struggle to connect? (p.xiii)

Thus, this is no dry, scholarly, objective account. There is justified passion behind Fairweather’s history. He writes with powerful but controlled rage against the silence, inactivity and willful ignorance of the powers that be that did not take Witold Pilecki’s reports into account in planning the end of the war against Nazi Germany and the re-organizing of European states afterwards so that those held responsible for the crimes committed would be punshed and the ideas they represented would be scraped away from the remnants of the civilization the war was conducted to destroy. It was bad enough that throughout the 1930s the Great Powers and the Press trivialized or ignored the rise of Fascism, Nazism and Communism as loathsome ideologies run by insane and wicked dictators. Fairweather sums up his work on the Holocaust: “a failure to recognize and act on its horror” (p. xv). It was for this reason not just a strategic lapse of judgment, as Catrine Clay showed in The Good Germans (reviewed on this Blog on 18 August 2021), in that there were many moments before and during the war when support by the British, French and Americans could have resulted in a coup d’état or assassination of Hitler, but an unforgivable moral failure.

One wonders whether today, two decades into the twenty-first century, these same world leaders, journalists and international organizations are up to preventing another catastrophe of the sort Witold Pilecki bore witness to and warned against. My own feelings are not very sanguine, even in the midst of several concomitant crises—climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, to name but two.

The narrative opens with the German invasion and occupation of Poland. Though Hitler had already announced his plans to annihilate all of the Jews in Europe, for the Polish people, its army and soon to be resistance organizations, the focus was clearly on salvaging what they could of their own country. They did not see in the Einsatzgruppen and other murder squads taking Jewish men, women and children from conquered Polish villages and towns into the forests to shoot en masse as anything special. The Nazis were also doing the same to Polish priests, teachers and other intellectuals. Witold Pilecki was one of those heroes who failed at this point to rise to the occasion, except as a Polish patriot.

Once sneaked into Auschwitz, which was a relatively small camp, Witold notes down the treatment of prisoners, and the way the kapo system worked; he reported those who were singled out for extra harsh punishments—priests and Jews; who even then made up a small percentage of the total. Individuals who released from the camp to return to Warsaw became the means for sending messages back to the resistance leaders. Yet he noticed more than the tallies who arrived and whose corpses disappeared into the pits and the documents that could be photographed and sent away in microfilm. According to Witold’s diary compiled somewhat later:

Most inmates underwent a personality change upon arriving in Auschwitz. The camp’s unremitting violence broke down the bonds between prisoners, forcing them to turn inward for survival. They became “cantankerous, mistrustful and in extreme cases even treacherous.” (p. 59)

For the non-Jews who formed the majority of prisoners in the early months of his work in the camp, survival remained at least a remote possibility and Witold could call on their nostalgia for home and their desire to inflict revenge on the Nazis through the resistance network he gradually put together. But still the response from Warsaw and London was cautious about mounting an attack on the concentration camp to allow an escape and call attention to what the Nazis were doing which was already way beyond the mere breaking of the Geneva Conventions for treatment of civilians and prisoners of war. The failure of imagination and the lapse in empathy deeply disturbed Witold Pilecki and forced his own personality to change. He was able to reformulate his insight into what was happening around him.

The camp had a way of stripping away pretensions to reveal a man’s true personality. “Some—slithered into a moral swamp,” Witold wrote later, “Others—chiseled themselves a character of finest crystal.” (p. 85)

Some slithered so far down into the swamp as to become Muselmänner, a condition wherein body, mind and soul slip away into virtual nothingness. Witold describes one such inmate reduced to subhuman status:

Even resting, his body ached. His skin was shiny and translucent and sensitive to the touch; his fingers, ears, and nose had turned blue from poor circulation. A telltale sign of his emaciation was the swelling in his legs and feet caused by the fact that it took longer for the water content of the body to reduce than the fats and muscle tissues. It was almost impossible to get his trousers and clogs on in the morning. He could stick his thumb into his legs as if they were made of dough. (pp. 98-99).

As for his mental condition, this poor creature was barely able to think.

His thoughts were jumbled and incoherent, and he sometimes lost consciousness walking back to camp in the evening [after long hours of forced labor in the fields], but he somehow managed to keep marching. Then his brain would reengage, slowly at first, before with a jolt he relized how close he’d come to stumbling… (p. 99)

However, this example of Muselmann is not the severe cases that come soon, especially when the Jews begin to replace the Polish, Russian POWs and others in Auschwitz, that is, those with a modicum of hope for survival. The Jews, as they filled up the camp and quickly were murdered in the gas chambers, had no such hope and most could not call on any inner spiritual strength to keep them going when an inevitable and horrible death was all there was to foresee.

As Witold could see, gradually week by week, the cruelties in Auschwitz became worse, the camp was expanded to receive more Jews, and the hopeless of the situation was manifest. Though his messages convinced a few of his colleagues in the resistance, and we even seen as powerful to stir the conscience and action of the Allies, in the event—nothing. The British hesitated to use horror stories as though they were back in World War One when propaganda claims of German atrocities proved false, did not want to stir up their Arab friends in the Holy Land who would not accept Jews as refugees, and, as always, did not want any more Jewish immigration at home or in the Empire. The Americans and Canadians also hung back for all sorts of reasons, mostly untenable and cowardly. Occasionally a newspaper in the US or Britain placed a notice in about what was not yet called the Holocaust, but hid it away on some back page, and never followed up. Even a delegation of rabbis who marched on Washington, DC and demanded to meet with FDR, went home with a paltry five minute conversation and no promises. Everyone was afraid that revealing the extent of the crimes and using them as a means of justifying attacks on Auschwitz and similar camps “would stir up anti-Semitism at home”. It was no longer a matter of not knowing went on but of ignoring the plight of the Jews.

By the end of August 1941, Churchill understood that the Nazi campaign against the Jews was murderous and unprecedented in scale. But like [the head of the underground, Stefan] Rowecki in Warsaw, he too failed to identify it as genocidal. (p. 173).

This failure was later rationalized away. Theologians argued that it “was possible to live in the ‘twilight between knowing and not knowing’” (p. 174), some grey zone[i] of willful ambiguity and empathy. Hence the saying that “Everyone loves dead Jews but couldn’t care less about living ones”.

The longer the Resistance in Poland held back from a diversionary attack on the gates of Auschwitz so as allow some proportion of the prisoners to escape and to create a newsworthy event, the harder it became for Witold to keep together his small band of men willing to mount an uprising from within. His assistants helped him compile evidence and to even take photographs so that at some point in the not so distant future they could bring the Nazi monsters to account, but the endless delays in agreement from Warsaw and London wore down almost everyone’s willingness to risk their lives in a futile symbolic gesture. Weeks dragged on to months and months to years.

Occasionally someone from Witiold’s secret gang would escape, with a few documents and a memory stocked with precise details, and would sometimes after many months of sneaking from place to place reach London: only to be kept waiting for still more months. Meanwhile the number of murdered Jews mounted from the hundreds of thousands to the millions. More barracks were built, more gas chambers constructed, more crematoria incinerating innocent men, women and children. News filtered in of Nazi reverses, Russian advances, Western Allies landing in Italy and Normandy: but each day thousands of Jews died in Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Malnutrition, overwork, disease and insane medical experiments went on. Witold duly noted each of the new atrocities, recorded the numbers of disappeared and waited for some positive reaction from the Polish Resistance in Warsaw, the Polish government in exile in London, the High Command of Western Allies, the Soviet armies under the direction of a malevolent Uncle Joe Stalin.

The Volunteer is peppered with photographs, drawings and copies of documents, as well as anecdotes on the people who are victims and victimizers, which lightens the heavy load of horrifying information on how the Nazis operated and the resistance and allies prevaricated. This includes glimpses of Witold Pilecki’s family and friends, the people he had to choose more to ignore than not in order to serve the higher cause. The higher cause was to see and empathize with the men and women murdered in atrocious ways so that he could later write up his notes and thus to leave a personal witness to what all too many of his colleagues and supposed allies refused to recognize. Insofar as he ventured to express his psychological insights into whast it felt like to lose one’s basic identity, as well as one’s life’s work, family and sense of being human, he adds to the tragedy of his own life: his inability to convince enough of the right people at the right time to act. The personal frustration and the historical futility of his efforts make this book, as we have sad, something much more than an objective history of Polish Resistance or the Nazi Holocaust. What to him was excruciatingly clear from what he saw and heard in the dark hell of Auschwitz was often incomprehensible to others. In those final months of the war particularly, when a Nazi military defeat seemed inevitable and the time of reckoning approached, the moral failure of those around him became unbearable to Witold.

From the time of the Wannsee Conference in which the Endlösung (Final Solution) was officially formulated as a coherent plan, the inner rage of Witold and his close associates who gathered the information, carried it to the Big Shots, and stood in shocked disbelief when they refused to see what was clear for anyone with half a brain to see and then to act on it. At certain times, too, the leaders of the Reiostance went beyond ignoring Witold and his messengers: they blocked their passage. Not just Witold in his official reports and private journals feels the frustration, but the author of this modern book, Jack Fairweather, keeps repeating the same message that nothing was done when there was time to do something, at most pious words and symbolic gestures.

It was obvious that the Germans meant to kill every Jew they could lay their hands on. The morale of his men had plunged and petty rivalries and squabbles had surfaced as their sense of purpose slipped away. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold the underground together. (p.270).

Unable to see what had happened at least by 1942, that whatever other aims Hitler may have had in starting the war in terms of gaining territory and control over vast populations of slave laborers, the reality was that—as secret documents discovered after the war, but also in speeches given by the Nazi elite to their leading generals and Gauleiters (district rulers)—the one and only aim of the military operations was to hold back the inevitable victory by the Soviet Union and the Western Allies long enough to complete the extermination of the Jews. As the end closed down on them, the Nazi leadership, with Hitler in the centre, became manifestly insane, called for the destruction of Germans and Germany in an apocalyptic end to the world, the Gotterdammerung.

As Szmul Zygielbojm, one of only two Jews to sit on the London-based Polish government in exile, said in his suicide note, expressing his utter frustration and disappointment with all the leaders of the war against the Third Reich:

By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people.

And the world’s response: silence.

[i] The Grey Zone, (2001) a film written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson, and starring David Arquette, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel and Natasha Lyonne, telling the story of the Auschwitz Twelfth Sonderkommando unit which, knowing that they like the eleven groups before them would be murdered in turn, staged the only known revolt in the extermination camp. Compare it to Son of Saul ( Saul fia) a 2015 Hungarian film directed by László Nemes, co-written by Nemes and Clara Royer. The “grey zone” represents the dark and gloomy images of the Jewish prisoners assigned to lead their coreligionists into the gas chambers and then, after stripping their bodies of valuables, push them into the crematoria or burning pits nearby; and the horrible situation in which survival depends on collaboration with the enemy.