By NIGEL WILLIS & ROB HOFMEYR
The Volunteer: The True Story Of The Resistance Hero Who Infiltrated Auschwitz by Jack Fairweather
Letters Home by Jolyon Nuttall
As may be expected from its subtitle, The Volunteer is a harrowing read. Much of its power derives from the uniqueness of the story. Its hero is Witold Pilecki, a gentleman farmer in Poland at the time of the Nazi occupation in September 1939. He was, throughout his life, a Polish nationalist and anti-communist. Consequent upon the invasion of his country, he joined the Polish resistance and underground. He chose to go to Auschwitz to gather information not only about the Nazi treatment of members of the Polish resistance but also to gather intelligence about the Nazi’s plans and military operations. At the time, Auschwitz was not yet an extermination camp. It was thought to be a prison camp; at worst a concentration camp. It was decided that Withold – as the author refers to him almost throughout the book – would ‘volunteer’ for Auschwitz by not going into hiding at the time of the anticipated roundup of members of the Polish resistance in September 1940. There he was to remain until his skillful and daring escape on Easter Monday in April 1943. He survived partly as a result of luck, partly owing to his ‘privileges’ as a non-Jewish inmate and partly because of the help and support he received from the Polish resistance, both within and outside the camp. Soon after the war ended, Withold was tried and executed in 1947 as an anti-communist enemy of the then Soviet-controlled Polish State. His extraordinary story may have been hidden forever, were it not for the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As a result, in 1991, a scholar at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum uncovered Withold’s clumsily written, unpublished memoirs, related relevant reports and other fragmentary writings that had been locked away in the Polish archives since 1948. Jack Fairweather puts together this story after an examination of those archives, interviews with the scholar who discovered them and interviews with family and friends of Withold, surviving inmates of Auschwitz and members of the Polish resistance as well as their descendants. The reader is taken to moral depths that include rare and deeply disturbing self-examination. As the author says, Withold’s story assists us to understand not only how Auschwitz came into being as an extermination camp but also ‘obliges us to confront how we respond to evil in our own time’. That was the purpose of Withold having written his memoirs. The necessity to supply Auschwitz with bread meant that the bakeries nearby provided the most frequently used conduit for smuggling out information. Other ingenious methods like putting messages into the heels of shoes taken from Jewish victims and throwing the shoes, in the dead of night, over the wires of the camp, were used to smuggle out information. Withold was one of the heroes who assisted in making the world aware of the unspeakable atrocities that were perpetrated at Auschwitz and elsewhere. The author searingly recounts how Withold, even though he was there, right in the midst of the deliberate, industrialised killing of human beings on account of their ‘race’, failed for a long time to accept that this was indeed what was going on. At first, he thought it was a case of Nazi ‘excesses’ and brutality. Then, he attributed it to ‘logistical difficulties’ in supplying food to Jews, while there was a ferocious war being fought on the Eastern Front. Later, he thought that the Nazis, desperate to survive a war they were losing, were doing it to obtain clothes and gold from teeth. The truth, which he accepted, not long before he escaped from Auschwitz, had been beyond imagining. In this regard, he mirrored the thinking of the Western political and military leadership. It was only in December 1942 that Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary and member of the war cabinet announced to a packed House of Commons that the Nazis had embarked on a ‘bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination’. This was the first publicly stated truth on the matter by the Allied leadership. Both Churchill and Roosevelt had received intelligence to this effect since about August 1941. Not until right near the end of the war, had the Allied leaders comprehended that the Nazis had decided to step up the extermination programmes, even as they were losing the war, so that their lasting ‘contribution’ to the world would be to ‘rid it of Jews’. The author debates whether the notorious conference of senior Nazi officers held at Wannsee on 20 January 1942 at which the ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’ was discussed, was a truly decisive event or merely a confirmation of a cumulative ‘progression’ of a process or was the conference, in some perverse and peculiar, way a combination of both? A recurring question that is posed as a moral dilemma in much of the book is whether the Allies should have bombed Auschwitz in order to prevent further extermination? The issue exercised the minds of the Allied war leaders, inmates of the camp and others keenly conscious of the atrocities. It is best that readers, presented with the facts and arguments, decide for themselves. What of the role of the Catholic church from pope to village priest? When, whether and how does one help inmates in a camp like Auschwitz? What do you do if, when spies are everywhere, you are asked, as a farmer on a smallholding, to allow persons to hide in a barn? Whom do you trust? Can a person be criticised for deciding to execute a Polish man who was blackmailing a Jewish woman who had escaped detection by using her Catholic husband’s surname? And what of nationalism itself, a cause to which Withold was so resolutely committed? Fairweather not only honours the life and memory of Withold in this superbly written book but also compels us to look inward at our own lives and times. – NW
Distinguished men do not necessarily write distinguished autobiographies. Letters Home is a slight book, with a potential readership amongst septuagenarians and their seniors, and probably mainly male and white. The letters home are of some interest in that they reflect the experiences of a newly minted journalist seconded to the New York Times in 1961. It was a remarkable opportunity, and one which Jolyon Nuttall exploited to the full, being offered a couple of positions in the USA as an alternative to returning to South Africa. A man of liberal persuasion, he found the policies being implemented by the National Party particularly abhorrent. More important was his serious relationship with a Japanese actress in New York, which gave them both great satisfaction, though often tense and challenging. The letters are the missives to his parents, his father being the liberal, devout and well-known principal of the Teachers Training College in Pietermaritzburg. He is aware of the uncertainty they must have felt regarding the relationship, but he is honest and forthright. The idea of marriage is seriously debated, and he attempts to establish both the possibilities of such a marriage in the South African context and the reaction of his family, friends and associates to such a union. Nuttall returns home, falls in love with someone more conventional and this is the beginning of a long and happy marriage. We then read a detailed account of his rise in the newspaper world, leaving journalism for management. He is highly successful, rising to head the Argus Group. There are reflections on his abandoning his Japanese love, and on his role in apartheid South Africa. A liberal businessman, who did not become an activist or political figure, he believed he had chosen the better path, allowing him to run a group opposed to government policy, ameliorating the working conditions of black, coloured and Indian staff. He regrets the fact that he was not far-seeing enough to engage the group actively in transformation, or even black advancement. Now comfortably retired on the Cape coast, sadly widowed, Nuttall enjoys his quiet life, busying himself with writing, and he has indeed produced several books. His tale is told with elegance and insight. But it is the story of many of his generation, the privilege of birth and race, good education and many opportunities. Not a whole-hearted recommendation. – RH