The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero who Infiltrated Auschwitz

So long as the prisoners could believe in the greater good, they were not defeated. Witold's men perished in many terrible ways, but they did so with a dignity that Nazism failed to destroy.

The camp had a way of stripping away pretensions to reveal a man’s true personality. “Some—slithered into a moral swamp,” Witold wrote later. “Others—chiseled themselves a character of finest crystal.

The camp [Auschwitz] had already developed nicknames for those on the edge of starvation: cripples, derelicts, jewels, but the most common was "Musselmänner," or "Muslims," seemingly in reference to how they rocked back and forth in their weakness as if in prayer.

anti-Semitism rather than reality. Most adjusted to the

Then he thought of the SS man whose flat they were renovating, how he talked excitedly about his wife’s arrival, no doubt imagining her joy when she saw the new kitchen. Outside the camp this SS officer appeared to be a respectable man, but once he crossed its threshold he was a sadistic murderer. The fact that he could inhabit both worlds at once seemed most monstrous of all.

Poland had been one of the most pluralistic and tolerant societies in Europe for much of its thousand-year history. However, the country that had reemerged in 1918 after 123 years of partition had struggled to forge an identity. Nationalists and church leaders called for an increasingly narrow definition of Polishness based on ethnicity and Catholicism.

Una sublevación en el campo «tendría un gran eco en todo el mundo», concluía la carta. «Solo hay un pensamiento que me frena: que crearía una tremenda represión contra el país.»