1901-1948

"Occupied Warsaw, Summer 1940 . . . Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground operative, accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands interned at a new concentration camp, report on Nazi crimes, raise a secret army, and stage an uprising. The name of the camp--Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, and under the cruelest of conditions, Pilecki's underground sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying Nazi plans to exterminate Europe's Jews, Pilecki realized he would have to risk his men, his life, and his family to warn the West before all was lost. To do so meant attempting the impossible--but first he would have to escape from Auschwitz itself . . ."--Dust jacket.

"To uncover the fate of the thousands being interred at a mysterious Nazi camp on the border of the Reich, a thirty-nine-year-old Polish resistance fighter named Witold Pilecki volunteered for an audacious mission: assume a fake identity, intentionally get captured and sent to the new camp, and then report back to the underground on what had happened to his compatriots there"--Jacket flap.

Barbara Cherish's upbringing under the Nazi regime was one of wealth and comfort. But her father's senior position in the Nazi party meant that she and her siblings lived under stress. The year she was born, 1943, her father, Arthur Wilhelm Liebehenschel, became commandant of Auschwitz. In researching her father's story, she found that he kept his relationship with his family and the demands of his job separate. He was found guilty of war crimes at the end of the war and executed in January 1948. At the age of six, she and her siblings were placed into foster care and she was adopted when she was thirteen She arrived in America in December 1956. Forty years later she publicly acknowledged who her birth father was and began her search for her identity.