Review of Jack Fairweather’s book
“The Volunteer: The true story of Witold Pilecki’s secret mission“
N
Dr. Adam Cyra
“The Volunteer: The true story of Witold Pilecki’s secret mission” won the book of the year 2019 at one of the most prestigious literary contests in the UK - the Costa Book Awards.
Fairweather, a native of Wales, in his 40s, was head of the office of the British newspaper “Daily Telegraph” in Baghdad and a videojournalist for the US “Washington Post” in Afghanistan, among others. In his books, he also wrote about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Speaking on the genesis of the book about Pilecki, Fairweather said that his colleague also a war correspondent, who visited the Ausch-witz-Birkenau Museum about a decade ago, told him the story of the heroic Cavalry captain. We jointly wrote about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He attended the anniversary celebrations in Oświęcim and read about the resistance movement that operated in the camp. The fact that such activity could have been carried out in such a place was something new to me. For me, Auschwitz was a symbol of the ultimate sacrifice and suffering. I found it astonishing to imagine that there was a group of people fighting the German Nazis at the very heart of this greatest evil.
Jack Fairweather and his documentalists worked on the book for nearly three years. I met him in 2016, when he visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum for the first time, presenting a plan to write his book. I became his first guide to the extraordinary fate of the Auschwitz volunteer. Over the next few years, I also offered him as much help as possible with my knowledge of the history of Auschwitz and facts from the life of Cavalry Captain Witold Pilecki. His documentalists were in regular contact with me, asking dozens of questions to which I tried to answer.
I took a closer interest in his fascinating and heroic figure in 1986 when I wrote the first article about him, which, however, was not published and I had no idea why. A few years later it turned out that all texts about Cavalry Captain Pilecki during the communist period in Poland had to be consulted with the management of the Central Office for the Control of Press, Publications and Performances, based on the censorship regulation drafted on 3 June 1980. Admittedly, the press had published articles about Pilecki before, but as a rule, they were only limited to his underground activity in the camp and the description of his escape; however, there was no mention of the circum-stances surrounding the execution of Pilecki during the post-war Stalinist terror in Poland.
In the spring of 1989, I tried again to present the extraordinary fate of the Cavalry Captain in the press, and this time I succeeded.
The Polish edition of the biography of Cavalry Captain Witold Pilecki, the voluntary Auschwitz prisoner and creator of the Polish military conspiracy in the camp, has been published and authored by the British writer and journalist Jack Fairweather.