The Volunteer: One Man, An Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz, written by award-winning Washington Post and Daily Telegraph correspondent Jack Fairweather, tells the story of Polish resistance fighter Witold Pilecki, who infiltrated the Auschwitz German Nazi death camp.
In 1940 Pilecki, an underground operative, accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands of people being interred at a new concentration camp.
He allowed himself to be arrested by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz in order to smuggle out intelligence to the Allies.
In his reports, he wrote about the horrors of the camp and German plans to exterminate European Jews.
In 1943, after escaping from the camp, Pilecki reached Warsaw, and a year later fought in the Warsaw Uprising.
After the war he went to Italy and joined the Second Corps, part of the Polish Armed Forces in the West. He was then sent to communist-ruled Poland as an intelligence agent.
He was captured and executed by Poland’s communist authorities three years after the end of World War II, following a show trial in which he was charged, among other things, with being a spy for “foreign imperialism.”
The official launch of the book, scheduled to take place on Monday evening in New York City, was to be hosted by the Consulate General of Poland.
(jh/pk)
Source: instytutpileckiego.pl