Published in the UK and the United States at the beginning of July under the title The Volunteer, the book tells the story of a man who got himself arrested by the German Nazis to be sent to Auschwitz in order to gather intelligence there.
Caroline Moorhead, writing in The Spectator, describes Pilecki as “a man of exceptional courage, [who] spent the rest of the war fighting with the Polish underground, took part in the Warsaw uprising against the Germans and was eventually accused of treason and put on trial in 1948 by the Polish communists and shot. Since 2000, when an account of his life was published in Poland, he has been considered a national hero.”
She stresses “Fairweather’s meticulous attention to accuracy”, adding that “the fascination of his book lies not just in the story of Witold Pilecki and his brave friends, nor in its punctilious chronicle of the information reaching the Allies, but the light it throws on Auschwitz’s early days, before it turned into a mass-killing centre for Europe’s Jews. If it sometimes seems as though there is nothing left to uncover about the Holocaust, Fairweather’s gripping book proves otherwise.”
Neal Bascomb wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Few books have enthralled, incensed and haunted me as The Volunteer has done. There were times I felt compelled to set it aside. There were others when hours of reading passed in what felt like moments. [...] The actions of Witold Pilecki, and the superb account of them by Jack Fairweather, inevitably engendered an array of intense emotions.”
He concludes his review by saying: “I am glad that such a fine writer and indefatigable researcher as Mr. Fairweather took on the job. This is a story that has long deserved a robust, faithful telling, and he has delivered it.”
According to Grzegorz Mazurowski, the press spokesman for the Warsaw-based Pilecki Institute, which offered assistance to Fairweather in the project, The Volunteer is being translated into Polish, Dutch, Czech, Russian, Lithuanian, Spanish and Portuguese.
(mk/pk)