“Essential reading for anyone interested in the Holocaust.”
— Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland
“Remarkable revelations.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A real contribution to our understanding of the history of Poland under Nazi occupation.”
— Antony Polonsky, the Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University
“An Allied hero who deserved to remembered and celebrated.”
— Norman Davies, FBA
“A shining example of heroism that transcends religion, race and time…This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the Holocaust.” — Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland
"A real contribution to our understanding of the history of Poland under Nazi occupation.” — Antony Polonsky, the Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University
“An Allied hero who deserved to be remembered and celebrated.” — Professor Norman Davies, historian and author (Vanished Kingdoms)
“This remarkable book...may shock but will surely enlighten. Here is a portion of the Auschwitz story that needed to be told.” — Gerhard L. Weinberg, the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, internationally recognized authority on Nazi Germany
"One man volunteered for Auschwitz, and now we have his story. . . Pilecki’s report on Auschwitz, unpublishable for decades in Communist Poland and now translated into English under the title “The Auschwitz Volunteer,” is a historical document of the greatest importance." -- Timothy Snyder, Yale Professor, author of Bloodlands The New York Times Sunday Book Review, June 24, 2012
“A historical document of the greatest importance.” The New York Times “Editors’ Choice”
“Extraordinary.” Maclean’s (Canada)
Summer 1945
So, I am to write down the driest of facts, which is what my friends want me to do.
They have told me: “The more you stick to the bare facts without any kind of commentary, the more valuable it all will be.”
Well, here I go...but we were not made out of wood, let alone stone, though it sometimes seemed as if even a stone would have broken out in a sweat.
Therefore, now and again I shall insert a thought amongst these facts to indicate what one was feeling.
I do not know whether this must by definition devalue the description.
One was not made out of stone, though I often envied it; one still had a heart beating, sometimes in one’s mouth, and certainly, running around one’s brain was the odd thought which I sometimes with difficulty grasped...
I think that inserting a sentence or two from time to time about this is needed in order to present a true picture.
*
• *
September 1940
The 19th of September 1940—the second street round-up in Warsaw.
There are a few people still alive who saw me go alone at 6:00 a.m. to the corner of Aleja Wojska and Felinskiego Street and join the “fives” of captured men drawn up by the SS.
On Plac Wilsona we were then loaded onto trucks and taken to the Light Horse Guards Barracks.
After having our particulars taken down in the temporary office there, being relieved of sharp objects and threatened with being shot if so much as a razor was later found on us, we were led out into the riding school arena where we remained throughout the 19th and the 20th.
During those two days some of us made the acquaintance of a rubber truncheon on the head. However, this was more or less within acceptable bounds for those accustomed to guardians of the peace using such methods to keep order.
Meanwhile, some families were buying their loved ones’ freedom, paying the SS huge sums of money.
At night, we all slept side by side on the ground.
The arena was lit by a huge spotlight set up right next to the entrance.
SS men with automatic weapons were stationed on all four sides.
There were about one thousand eight hundred or so of us.
What really annoyed me the most was the passivity of this group of Poles. All those picked up were already showing signs of crowd psychology, the result being that our whole crowd behaved like a herd of passive sheep.
A simple thought kept nagging me: stir up everyone and get this mass of people moving.
I suggested to my comrade, Slawek Szpakowski (who I know was living in Warsaw up to the Uprising),[1] a joint operation during the night: take over the crowd, attack the sentry posts while I, on my way to the lavatory, would “bump” into the spotlight and smash it.
However, I had a different reason for being there.
This would have been a much less important objective.
While he—thought the idea was total madness.
On the morning of the 21st we were put onto trucks and, escorted by motorcycles with automatic weapons, were taken off to the western railroad station and loaded onto freight cars.
The railroad cars must have been used before for carrying lime, for the floors were covered in it.
The cars were shut. We travelled for a whole day. We were given nothing to eat or drink. In any case, no one wanted to eat. The previous day we had been issued some bread, which we did not yet know how to eat or to treasure. We were just very thirsty. The lime, when disturbed, turned into a powder. It filled the air, irritating our nostrils and throats. We got nothing to drink.
We could see through the cracks between the boards covering the windows that we were being taken in the direction of Czestochowa.
Around 10:00 p.m. (22:00 hours) the train stopped somewhere and went no further. We could hear shouting and yelling, the cars being opened up and the baying of dogs.
I consider this place in my story to be the moment when I bade farewell to everything I had hitherto known on this earth and entered something seemingly no longer of it.
This is not an attempt on my part to use unusual words or terms. Quite the contrary, I believe that I do not need to attempt to use any irrelevant or pretty little word.
This is how it was.
We were struck over the head not only by SS rifle butts, but also by something far greater.
Our concepts of law and order and of what was normal, all those ideas to which we had become accustomed on this earth, were given a brutal kicking.
Everything came to an end.
The idea was to hit us as hard as possible. To break us psychologically as speedily as possible.
A hubbub and the sound of yelling voices gradually drew near. Eventually, the doors of our freight car were wrenched open. Lights shone in, blinding us.
“Heraus!rrraus!rrraus!...,” the SS belabored us with epithets and rifle butts to our shoulders, backs and heads. The idea was to get out as quickly as possible.
I leapt out, managing somehow to avoid being hit, and joined the “fives” in the center of the column.
A larger group of SS was hitting, kicking and screaming: “Zu fünfen! [Form up in fives!]”
Dogs urged on by the crazed soldiery rushed at those on the outside of the column.
Blinded by the lights, shoved, beaten, kicked, and rushed by the dogs, we had suddenly found ourselves in conditions which I doubt any of us had ever experienced. The weaker ones were so overwhelmed that they simply fell into a stupor.
We were urged on towards a larger cluster of lights.
On the way, one of us was told to run to a post at the side of the road; he was followed by a burst of automatic weapons fire and mown down. Ten men were then dragged out of the ranks at random and shot with pistols as “collective responsibility” for the “escape,” which the SS themselves had staged.
All eleven of them were then dragged along by leg straps. The dogs were teased with the bloody corpses and set on them.
All this to the accompaniment of laughter and joking.
We approached a gate in a wire fence over which could be seen the sign “Arbeit macht frei” [“Work Liberates You”].
It was only later that we learned to understand it properly.
------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Pilecki is referring to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, not the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Translator’s note.
CONTENTS
Introduction by Norman Davies …………………………………………. xi Foreword by Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland …………. xv
Translator’s Introductory Note …………………………………………… xix Publisher’s Note ………………………………………………………….. xxiii Selected Highlights from Pilecki’s 1945 Report …………………………. xxix List of Maps ………………………………………………………………. xxxi
Historical Horizon Captain Witold Pilecki: The Report, the Mission, the Man ………. xxxiii
Captain Pilecki’s Covering Letter to Major General Tadeusz Pelczynski …………………………… 1
Captain Witold Pilecki’s 1945 Auschwitz Report …….…………………. 5
Appendices
1 Glossary of English, German and Polish Terms and Acronyms …………………………………………………...335
2 German-Language Positions and Ranks at Auschwitz Mentioned by Pilecki …………………………………………….343
3 Index of People and Places Referred to by Pilecki with Either a Code Number or Letter …………………….…...…345
4 Chronology of Pilecki’s 1945 Report …………………………...……355
Index ……………………………………………………….……………..365
Discussion Questions ……………………………………………………..397
LIST OF MAPS
Europe 1939 ……………………………………………... vi Poland–September 1939 ……………………………….. ix Occupied Poland 1939–1941 …………………………… x Auschwitz and Environs–1944 …………………………. 9
KL Auschwitz 1 …………………………………………. 10
Pilecki’s Escape Route from Auschwitz ………………… 300
Another common misconception concerns the scourge of the concentration camps. Many Westerners continue to imagine that concentration camps were somehow a monopoly of the Nazis; they equally fail to make the important distinction between concentration camps, like Dachau or Majdanek and fully fledged death camps, like Treblinka. Few of them realise that the Soviet ‘liberators of Auschwitz’ were busy running a massive network of concentration camps of their own. In reality, the Russian acronym, the GULag, stands for “State Board of Concentration Camps”. All the indications are that Soviet instruments of repression consumed more human beings than their Nazi counterparts.
Pilecki’s third Report on Auschwitz was written in 1945 at a time when his fight against German tyranny had ended and when his fight against Soviet tyranny was about to begin. It is a poignant reminder of the double threat which Europe faced in the mid-20th Century.
I myself became fully aware of the greatness of Witold Pilecki while conducting research on the Warsaw Rising of 1944. Here was a man, who almost single-handedly had held up the German panzers on one of Warsaw’s main thoroughfares for a fortnight; using the pseudonym ‘Roman’, he then disappeared into his dugout and continued the struggle until the Rising capitulated over two months later. Only then did I realise that this was the same heroic character, who four years earlier had deliberately arranged to be arrested by the SS and be transported to Auschwitz. In 1943, having engineered his escape, he wrote the first version of his Report on Auschwitz, which I had read and which had been the first of several attempts to inform the outside world of what was really happening. Pilecki was a Polish officer and Catholic who viewed his fight against his country’s oppression as synonymous with his patriotic and religious duty. If ever there was an Allied hero who deserved to be remembered and celebrated, this was a person with few peers.
Yet Pilecki’s astonishing career did not end with the declaration of peace. He was put to death by an act of judicial murder, destroyed by a Communist regime which was working for Stalin’s interests and which treated all non-Communist resistance fighters as traitors and Nazi-lovers. Pilecki’s name mirrors the tragic fate of millions whom the West forgot. Only when one grasps the true horror of his fate can one comprehend what the Second World War in Europe was really about.
Norman Davies, FBA Oxford, Great Britain February 2012
PeachesRR
Posted July 28, 2012
My expectations were not met - The Nazi thing has been done to death - We know how bad they were - We actually were in Auschwitz and saw the places in the book and it was very moving to be there. However the day to day accounting of the book was a bit tedious. We were aware of the camps history and its original purpose of holding and eliminating Poles. For the novice that may be new but otherwise there was nothing especially revealing in the book. But then, it was never intended to be a novel - just a military report.
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Overview
A Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club® and the Military Book Club®
“Essential reading for anyone interested in the Holocaust.”
— Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland
“Remarkable revelations.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A real contribution to our understanding of the history of Poland ...