Polish army officer Witold Pilecki volunteered to be arrested by the Germans and reported from inside the camp. His intelligence reports, smuggled out in 1941, were among the first eyewitness accounts of Auschwitz atrocities: the extermination of Soviet POWs, its function as a camp for Polish political prisoners, and the "final solution" for Jews. Pilecki received brutal treatment until he escaped in April 1943; soon after, he wrote a brief report. This book is the first English translation of a 1945 expanded version. In the foreword, Poland's chief rabbi states, "If heeded, Pilecki's early warnings might have changed the course of history." Pilecki's story was suppressed for half a century after his 1948 arrest by the Polish Communist regime as a "Western spy." He was executed and expunged from Polish history. Pilecki writes in staccato style but also interjects his observations on humankind's lack of progress: "We have strayed, my friends, we have strayed dreadfully... we are a whole level of hell worse than animals!" These remarkable revelations are amplified by 40 b&w photos, illus., and maps

    Appendices--Reports of the ghetto uprising sent out of Poland by Bund organisations.This remarkable memoir by Marek Edelman, member of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance five-person command team, tells first-hand of the struggle of Warsaw's Jews against the Nazis in the spring of 1943.

    Written by a master of twentieth-century Hungarian literature, it describes life for the Jewish population of German-occupied Budapest--the constant fear of deportation overshadowing the daily trials of living in the ghetto--before concentrating on the writer's own internment in a labor camp during the first weeks of rule by the extremist Arrow Cross regime. The experiences of those nineteen days spent in the camp are both harsh and disturbing, yet throughout his memoir Szep manages to maintain an extraordinary degree of compassion and detachment, even humor. Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the events described, this is the last of Szep's many literary works to appear in English."