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Title details for The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather - Available

The Volunteer

The True Story of the Resistance Hero who Infiltrated Auschwitz – Costa Book of the Year 2019

by Jack Fairweather
David Rintoul
Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available

Brought to you by Penguin.

The 2019 Costa Book of the Year and Biography Winner.

How do you keep fighting in the face of unimaginable horror?
Narrated by David Rintoul, this is the untold story of one of the greatest heroes of the Second World War.
In the summer of 1940, after the Nazi occupation of Poland, an underground operative called Witold Pilecki accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands of people being interred at a new concentration camp on the border of the Reich.
His mission was to report on Nazi crimes and raise a secret army to stage an uprising. The name of the detention centre - Auschwitz.
It was only after arriving at the camp that he started to discover the Nazis' terrifying designs. Over the next two and a half years, Witold forged an underground army that smuggled evidence of Nazi atrocities, culminating in the mass murder of over a million Jews, to the West. His reports from the camp were to shape the Allies response to the Holocaust - yet his story was all but forgotten for decades.
This is the first major account of his amazing journey, drawing on exclusive family papers and recently declassified files as well as unpublished accounts from the camp's fighters to show how he saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
The result is an enthralling story of resistance and heroism against the most horrific circumstances and one man's attempt to change the course of history.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio on our Desktop Site.
© Jack Fairweather 2019 (P) Penguin Audio 2019

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 27, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780753554647
      • File size: 280412 KB
      • Duration: 09:44:11

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 29, 2019
      “Witold Pilecki volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz,” writes former war correspondent Fairweather in this immaculately detailed history, and rather than being heralded as a hero, he was tried, executed, and “effectively deleted from history” by his country. Fairweather mines letters, coded diaries, and personal interviews to tell the story of how Pilecki, a gentleman farmer and Polish cavalry officer, left his family, assumed a false identity, and handed himself over to the Gestapo for imprisonment at Auschwitz along with all the other military-age men in Warsaw. For two and a half years, he endured torture, starvation, and disease, witnessing Jewish families being led to the gas chambers and choking on the fumes from burning bodies, all the while risking his life to collect information on death tolls and building plans for death chambers and crematoriums that would be smuggled out by released upper-class prisoners. Pilecki was devastated when the Polish resistance and the Allies refused to believe that Auschwitz had become the center of the “final solution.” After escaping on his own, Pilecki returned to a Poland decimated by the fleeing Germans and seized by the encroaching Communist forces, which labeled him a traitor for opposing them and executed him. Fairweather tells this tragic tale in gripping fashion, bringing a new angle to the literature of the Holocaust. Illus. Agent: Larry Weissman, Larry Weissman Literary.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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