The Volunteer
By Jack Fairweather
Custom House, 528pp, £20/$28.99
Who on Earth would volunteer to enter Auschwitz? It sounds like suicide and indeed it could have been.
When the Polish officer Witold Pilecki accepted Nazi imprisonment in order to infiltrate the camp, it was not the infamous house of mass murder that it would become. Its nature then was cloaked in mystery. But how this devoted family man, dutiful soldier and undemonstrative but sincere believer would respond to its fantastic evil would come to define him.
