Review Detail

‘A Rebel in Auschwitz: The True Story of the Resistance Hero Who Fought the Nazis from Inside the Camp’ by Jack Fairweather deals with a terribly difficult and unsettling topic. Yet, it tells the story of the life of Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground operative. A brave man by any measure, he began interning at Auschwitz, at the time a new concentration camp. His goals included finding ways to report on Nazi crimes, raising a secret army, and staging an uprising.

Lofty goals indeed, the narrative spends time focusing on prisoner treatment and how Witold infiltrated the camp. Readers learn that he and his underground spent two and a half years, under harsh conditions, sabotaging facilities, assassinating Nazi officers, and gathering any form of evidence possible to plead their case. As he learned more and more about what the Nazis were planning, it made him realize that he must make a choice about how much he was willing to risk to save the lives of others.

This “true story in focus” provides pictures, diary entries, survivor accounts, information about declassified files, and the knowledge that there are good people in the world—those who are willing to risk life and limb to protect others, at any cost. While the beginning of the book isn’t as easy to read through, once you get a few chapters in, it flows much more smoothly and will grip readers, bringing them back to the past, to a time that history cannot forget, lest it repeat itself.