Jack Fairweather.
JACK FAIRWEATHER: witold pilecki biography
The Volunteer: The Hero who Infiltrated Auschwitz (2019)
Winner of the 2019 Costa Prize for Biography.
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Witold Pilecki (born 1901) was a Polish cavalry officer, intelligence agent, and resistance leader. When Poland was invaded by Germany in the Second World War Pilecki was joint founder of the Secret Polish army resistance movement. In 1940 he volunteered to allow himself to be captured by the Germans so that he could infiltrate the Auschwitz concentration camp. This he did, and once inside he organized a resistance movement eventually involving hundreds of inmates. He compiled reports of German atrocities at the camp, which were smuggled out to the western allies. After escaping from Auschwitz in April 1943, Pilecki fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August to October 1944. Afer the suppression of the uprising he was interned in a German prisoner of war camp. After the communist takeover of Poland Pilecki remained loyal to the Polish government in exile based in London. He was arrested by the secret police in 1947, and was executed in 1948.
Jack Fairweather draws on unpublished family papers, recently released archives, and interviews with survivors, to tell Pilecki’s heroic story. The Economist wrote of the book: 'Pilecki is perhaps one of the greatest unsung heroes of the second world war ... this insightful book is likely to be the definitive version of this extraordinary life'.
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Jack Fairweather (born 1978) is an English journalist and author, who was educated at Atlantic College and at Lincoln College, Oxford University. He worked as a freelance war correspondent embedded with British Troops during the 2003 Iraq invasion, surviving an attempted kidnapping and an attempted attack by a suicide bomber. He met his wife Christina Asquith while she was working in Iraq for he New York Times. His other books include: ‘The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan’.
