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.
Reviewed by Norman Simms
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.
Hid 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.
