A Featured Selection of the History Book Club®

A Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club® and the Military Book Club®

"This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the Holocaust."

— Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland

COMING IN APRIL 2012!

"The game I was now playing in Auschwitz was dangerous. This sentence does not really convey the reality; in fact, I had gone far beyond what people in the real world would consider dangerous..."
—Captain Witold Pilecki

Witold Pilecki's seminal eyewitness report on Auschwitz,
published in English for the first time.

In June 1940, nine months after Nazi Germany invaded Poland to begin World War II, the Germans opened a new concentration camp in southwest Poland near the small town of Oswiecim, which they called Auschwitz. They took over the barracks of a former Polish artillery garrison and emptied the surrounding countryside for fifteen square miles, evicting Polish families from their homes and farms.

The Polish Underground wanted to know what the Germans were up to. In September 1940, Polish Army officer Witold Pilecki volunteered for a potentially suicidal secret mission—to get himself arrested by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz as a prisoner.

To the best of our knowledge, Pilecki is the only person who voluntarily chose to become a prisoner at Auschwitz—not for one or two days, but for years.

His undercover mission: smuggle out intelligence about this new German concentration camp, and build a resistance organization among prisoners with the ultimate goal of liberating the camp.

Pilecki barely survived nearly three years of hunger, disease and brutality, but he accomplished his mission before escaping in April 1943. His clandestine intelligence reports from the camp, received by the Allies as early as 1941, were among the first eyewitness evidence of what was going on at Auschwitz.

Soon after his escape, Pilecki wrote a short eleven-and-a-half page debriefing report for his Polish Army superiors about his time in Auschwitz. A few months later, in the fall of 1943, he amplified this report with a longer version called Raport W, and in 1945 he wrote his most comprehensive report of more than one hundred single-spaced typed foolscap pages—it is this last, most comprehensive, report that Jarek Garlinski has translated here from its original Polish.

Pilecki's 1945 report had no formal title. In publishing this first English-language edition, we have chosen the title The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery. Since Pilecki was, by all accounts, a modest person, it is doubtful that he would have chosen such a title himself. We have done so to honor this most extraordinary and courageous man.

"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 be remembered and celebrated."

— Norman Davies, FBA

THE AUSCHWITZ VOLUNTEER: BEYOND BRAVERY

Hardcover: ISBN 978-1-60772-009-6 ($42.95)
Trade Paperback: ISBN 978-1-60772-010-2 ($34.95)

Available APRIL 2012

Author: Captain Witold Pilecki
Translator: Jarek Garlinski
Introduction: Norman Davies, FBA
Foreword: Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland
Publisher: Aquila Polonica Publishing
Language: English
Page Count: 392
Size: 6" x 9"
Includes more than 40 black and white photos, maps and illustrations; contextualizing historical material

Publicity: Debra Gendel, email: debra at aquilapolonica.com; tel (U.S.): 310-710-1903