The Volunteer summary

In June 1940, Witold received the first reports of a new Nazi concentration camp outside the town of Oświęcim – or, to use its German name, Auschwitz. Concentration camps were common enough in Hitler’s Germany. Thousands of politicians, activists, Jewish people, and gay people had been interned in concentration camps in Germany before the war even began. But Auschwitz was different. It was the first camp to target a group according to its nationality – Poles. In particular, men in the Polish resistance. Men like Witold.

Witold and his compatriots set a plan in motion: he’d infiltrate the camp, gain intelligence, organize an underground resistance cell, and stage a breakout. Based on prison camps they knew, it seemed like a reasonable idea. Witold volunteered for the duty. In September 1940, he allowed himself to be picked up by the police.

Prisoners in Auschwitz had more to fear than violence. Prisoners were officially assigned daily rations of 1,800 calories, [slight pause] two-thirds of what a man doing hard labor needs to survive. In fact, they received even less. Kapos kept the best food for themselves, leaving most prisoners with just 1,000 calories per day. If a prisoner grew too weak to work, he’d be beaten to death or shot.

Prisoners lined up every morning for work-crew assignments. The unlucky ones, and everyone who was Jewish, were assigned to the gravel pits. This work killed quickly; people rarely survived more than a few days of it. On one occasion, Witold found himself there after attracting the attention of a hated kapo. On the gravel pit gang, he realized with horrible apprehension what the huge chimney that loomed over the camp was for: it was a crematorium, to incinerate human bodies. And he and the other men were building an expansion.

Back in Warsaw, the released prisoner had managed to deliver his message. The Warsaw underground leader was horrified, but not particularly surprised, at the scale of the Nazi war crimes. He arranged for the message to be delivered to Madrid, where it was put in a diplomatic pouch bound for London.

The British and the Polish had a difficult relationship. The British didn’t take their Polish colleagues seriously – even Churchill openly mocked their hard-to-pronounce names. As a result, the British didn’t heed Witold’s report of Nazi war crimes – even when delivered by the Polish prime minister-in-exile. Witold recommended bombing Auschwitz , a request that British Bomber Command curtly denied. It set a tragic precedent for nonintervention.

Each day at Auschwitz brought fresh horror. Witold became increasingly disturbed and upset that he’d had no word from Warsaw since entering the camp over a year ago. He felt ashamed, surmising that he’d failed to convey properly the staggering nature of the crimes he’d witnessed. He redoubled his efforts at documentation. What he found was staggering. Witold’s source in the camp record office reported that over 3,000 Soviet POWs had been gassed in about a month – more than all the Poles who’d been killed in the camp’s first year. The killings were accelerating.

When the Nazis invaded Eastern Europe, they forced Jewish people to live in cramped, walled-off ghettos within cities. There, they targeted Jewish people with discrimination, violence, and murder. In the Warsaw ghetto, thousands died each month from lack of food and medicine. Reports were also surfacing of Jewish pogroms in the rest of Poland.

By summer 1942, the public was catching wind of the atrocities against Jewish people in Europe. In London, the Polish PM-in-exile demanded immediate military action from the Allies, and there were protests organized by Jewish groups both in New York and London.

Roosevelt and Churchill sent messages of support. But neither admitted that the violence against Jewish people had turned genocidal, thus failing to differentiate it from the persecution of other Europeans. Even worse, neither leader offered humanitarian assistance for the thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Europe. 

Napoleon departed from Warsaw in August bearing a message of vital importance: eyewitness accounts of Auschwitz and the latest ghastly news from the Warsaw ghetto. Every Jewish person in Warsaw had been marked for extermination. In the first 18 days of the liquidation, 100,000 Jewish people were murdered.

Meanwhile, mass exterminations were having an impact on camp life. For one thing, the sheer number of dead was presenting a problem for the Nazis. Mass graves were contaminating the groundwater, and construction on new crematoria was months from completion. The SS began burning bodies in giant pyres. The soldiers and prisoners in charge of tending the fires frequently lost their minds or took their own lives.

As the spring of 1943 began to thaw the frozen ground, Witold became obsessed with the idea of escape. He knew there wasn’t much hope. There’d been hundreds of escape attempts over the years, and only a dozen or so had been successful. But he felt he’d suffered enough for a mission that had clearly failed. His only choice now, he felt, was to personally report the horror he’d witnessed. 

He and his comrade Jan Redzej talked endlessly about possible escape plans. They finally settled on one: they’d get work in a heavily guarded bakery about a mile outside the camp, in sight of open fields. While working, they’d be locked inside the bakery – but that didn’t matter. They could copy keys in the camp metal shop. Witold stashed civilian clothes, some money, sugar to bribe the bakers, tobacco to hide their scent from the Nazis’ German Shepherds, and cyanide capsules in case they were caught. They settled on Easter Monday 1943 for an escape, when guards would be either drunk or on leave.

Witold trudged back through the outskirts of Warsaw. It was August 1943, nearly three years since he’d volunteered to go to Auschwitz. The horror he’d witnessed in the camp had changed him forever. But he was doubly embittered by the fact that no one seemed to care that it was happening. As he passed into the city, he was animated by a single mission: he’d reconnect with the underground and do everything in his power to convince them to attack the camp immediately.

But it wasn’t to be. The city was gripped by bloody guerrilla warfare, and the Warsaw underground was making gains in the city against the Nazis. Soon enough, word came down from on high: there’d be no attack on the camp.

It was January when they got the news they’d been dreading. That winter, Witold and his Polish comrades were imprisoned in a concentration camp in southern Bavaria. One stroke of luck was the camp’s proximity to the Swiss border. That meant that it was regularly monitored by the Red Cross, so their treatment was much better than what Witold was used to.

But the trauma of the last few years didn’t make news of the Soviet invasion of Warsaw any easier for Witold to bear. Many of his comrades, though, were too exhausted to feel angry. Some argued that they should keep the resistance going, but most just wanted to put the war behind them and go home. Witold wasn’t one of them. He’d sworn an oath long before to fight for Polish sovereignty, and to that he would hold.