The Volunteer

Jack Fairweather

This is the true story of an invisible hero of World War II, Witold Pilecki. A brave officer in the Polish army and a member of the Warsaw resistance, who in the autumn of 1940, while the Nazis had occupied Poland, voluntarily infiltrated Auschwitz, formed a resistance nucleus and wrote reports on the Nazi atrocities. For about three years he experiences the nightmare and sees the concentration camp turned into a death factory. And yet, when the war ends and the Soviets become the new masters of his beloved homeland, he is convicted of high treason and executed after a mock trial. His heroic efforts to inform the Allied forces about Auschwitz's hell and to force them to react were revealed decades later, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of the Polish state archives. Witold Pilecki passed away thinking he had failed. His voice, clear and optimistic at first, in the end became a whisper, extinguished exhausted and disappointed. And yet, his contribution to revealing the truth about the monster of Nazism is now considered incalculable.