The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather review – the hero who sent himself to Auschwitz

This year will mark the 75th anniversary of the end of the second world war, probably the most revisited period of history in history. And yet this looming event – and in particular the genocide at its heart – continues to yield revelatory stories and inspire exceptional writing.

Four years ago, Philippe Sands’s East West Street traced the roots of modern human rights law back to two Jews who emerged from the “bloodlands”, to use the historian Timothy Snyder’s term, of Lviv in what was Poland and is now Ukraine. If that extraordinary book grappled with the meaning of law in the depths of depravity, then Jack Fairweather’s The Volunteer, the deserved winner of the Costa book award, explores the limits of humanity in the same dreadful context.

The volunteer is Witold Pilecki, a Polish officer who was born in Wilno, then in Poland, now Vilnius in Lithuania. After Poland was invaded and divided by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939 – with its political, professional and officer class ruthlessly annihilated by both powers – Pilecki joined the Polish underground.

He laboured at first under the illusion that Poland’s French and British allies would soon come to his country’s rescue. As these hopes began to subside, he was recommended by a rival officer for the mission to infiltrate a concentration camp the Germans had established in southern Poland called Auschwitz. His near-impossible task was to set up and maintain an underground resistance.

Though little was known at that time about the workings of the camp, there was at least enough information to suggest that it was effectively a suicide mission. Nonetheless Pilecki took up the challenge, got himself arrested in an SS round-up and was duly transported to Auschwitz.

On his arrival, he was beaten and brutalised as part of an initiation process to force new prisoners to adjust to the hell they had entered. “Let none of you imagine that he will ever leave this place alive,” one of the senior Germans warned the prisoners, explaining that their food rations had been calculated to enable six weeks’ survival and, if anyone outlasted that, it meant that they were stealing and would be duly punished.

There have been many testaments to the cruelties of Auschwitz, but few have followed its development from concentration camp to extermination camp with such gripping descriptive power.

The very idea of solidarity was total anathema to the Auschwitz regime, which was a kind of microcosm in extreme of Nazi philosophy put into practice.

For inmates to demonstrate shared values, trust and selflessness was not just to invite torture and death, but to challenge the very process of dehumanisation that the Nazis demanded all prisoners undergo. Yet somehow Pilecki was able to convey these higher qualities in such a manner that others wanted to follow his example.

It cost many their lives, but for over two and a half years Pilecki stuck to his mission through unimaginable suffering, a near-fatal bout of typhus and the constant threat of exposure. He built an underground resistance movement and smuggled out in-depth reports from the frontline of Hitler’s race war.

Unlike many of his fellow Polish Catholics, Pilecki was also alert to the plight of the Jews. He was among the first to alert the world to the gas chambers that awaited Jewish men, women and children who were transported to Auschwitz.

But to what end? Pilecki begged for the camp to be targeted by allied bombers and pleaded the case for an attack by the Polish underground. None of it made any difference. The allies maintained that all efforts should be focused on winning the war, and that to highlight the mass murder of Jews in Auschwitz would, perversely, foster antisemitism. Meanwhile the Polish underground – itself riddled with virulent antisemitism – decided that any assault on the camp would be too dangerous.

Related: Dispatches from hell: the extraordinary story of the hero who infiltrated Auschwitz

Eventually, when he realised that his meticulous accounts of the unfolding genocide had left both his and the world’s leaders unmoved, Pilecki staged a breathtaking escape in 1943, during which he was shot. Nevertheless he got away and made it to Warsaw, where he fought bravely in the doomed uprising of August-October 1944, which cost more than 100,000 Polish lives.

He was then taken to a prison camp in Germany, was saved by the Americans from death at the hands of the SS, and after a brief recuperation in Italy, he chose to return to Poland, which had been occupied by the Soviets.

Pilecki remained loyal to the Polish government in exile in the UK, but a communist puppet regime was installed by Stalin. It arrested 80,000 members of the Polish underground, among them Pilecki, who was executed in 1948 following a show trial in which he was portrayed as a traitor. His courageous exploits were wiped from history by the communists, and it wasn’t until after the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989 that Pilecki could be discussed again.

This vivid portrait is of someone who is no way a larger-than-life or conspicuous hero, but instead a man with a remarkable sense of faith, despite the most inhospitable conditions, in human decency.

Pilecki’s tale is well known in Poland, but now finally this towering figure has been brought to the attention of a much wider global audience. Fairweather’s book is an impressive feat of research, organised by a keen moral intelligence and written with the elegance and pace of a first-rate thriller.

• The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero Who Infiltrated Auschwitz by Jack Fairweather is published by WH Allen (£7.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15