The Non-Jewish Pole Who Snuck Into Auschwitz to Document Its Horrors

In 2008, PBS aired a documentary about Jewish prisoners who somehow managed to escape from Auschwitz. Some 144 people—out of many hundreds of thousands of inmates—are thought to have snuck out of the camp alive. But perhaps even more daring, and less well known, is the story of Witold Pilecki, a non-Jewish Pole who deliberately made his way into Auschwitz and remained there, despite opportunities to escape, in order to document the camp’s horrors. As detailed in The Volunteer, a recently published book by the British journalist Jack Fairweather, there was nothing in Pilecki’s early life to suggest such heroism.

Born in 1901 to a modest noble family in what is now Belarus (then Russian-ruled Poland), Pilecki was a mostly apolitical man “of his time and social class,” likely sharing that time and class’s casual anti-Semitism and condescension toward the local peasantry. After his father took ill, Pilecki took control of the crumbling family estate, married, and had children.

This contented and conventional life changed upon the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. At the time, Pilecki was serving as a second lieutenant in the Polish cavalry reserves. After a brief clash with the overwhelmingly superior Germans, he and his unit had no choice but to retreat. They were hardly alone: between them, the Nazis and Soviets, then bound together in a mutual non-aggression pact, succeeded in completely subduing the entire country within a few weeks.