Everything Is F*cked

Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

*by Mark Manson (2019)*

The man who volunteered for Auschwitz

Witold Pilecki was already a war hero before he did the most insane thing of his life. Polish-Soviet war veteran. Cavalry officer. Husband, father, lover of horses, fancy hats, and cigars. Then Hitler invaded from the west, Stalin from the east, and Poland was torn open in five weeks. Pilecki helped found the Secret Polish Army in occupied Warsaw, an underground resistance running messages and weapons under the noses of the SS.

In the spring of 1940, Pilecki and his unit got word the Germans were building something on the southern outskirts of a small town nobody outside Poland had heard of. Auschwitz. Polish officers were vanishing into it by the thousand. Nobody knew what was happening inside. Allied intelligence had nothing.

So Pilecki volunteered to get arrested. Not metaphorically. He stood on a street corner in Warsaw past curfew until the SS picked him up and shipped him in. He is the only person ever known to have voluntarily walked into a Nazi concentration camp.

What he found was worse than anyone outside imagined. A third of the men in his barracks died in his first month. Prisoners were shot in roll call for fidgeting. And inside that horror, Pilecki built an underground resistance unit. Chain of command. Officers. Smuggling rings for food and medicine. He hand-built a transistor radio out of stolen parts and started transmitting plans for an uprising back to Warsaw. He was the first person to alert the world to the Holocaust. The Polish government in exile passed his reports to London. They reached Eisenhower and Churchill.