and here is pilecki not as a prisoner.ver the next two and a half years trying to forge an underground army in auschwitz that sabotage facilities, assassinated ss officers and plotted an armed uprising. he was arriving in auschwitz at the beginning as a concentration camp for polish nationals, thus he witnessed the steps by which the nazis conceived of the final solution for europe's jews. he was the first person to seek to warn the world about the horrors of the camp, and he was the first to try and stop them. three years before out lied commanders publicly acknowledged auschwitz is a role, pilecki was already calling on them to secret messages smuggled out of the camp to destroy auschwitz. and yet for all of his exploits in auschwitz, his story is almost unknown. indeed i only heard of it by chance. i met up with a were reported friend of mine in 2011, and we would talk about our experiences in war zones and make sense of our experiences, and my friend had just come back from a trip to auschwitz and learned about a resis

that to be told pilecki. when i heard to the words i had goose bums but a they are verbatim what pilecki made alexander enemy rise while he was in the -- memorize while he was in the camp and it's a stunning idea to think what might have happened had the allies intervened and i went on to trace up to ten of pilecki's reports, each time i was there to find using the same sort of process of deductive reasoning and finding family members and retracing journeys, finding their reports made their way to london and the reason why i argue in the book, why i'm so passionate about pilecki's story, the reason why it's so important is that he charts the steps through his writings by which the nazis turned auschwitz interest a concentration camp for polish nationals into the center of the final solution and his reports are -- bear witness in an extraordinary way to different steps, and it's one of histories great what might have businesses, what would have hand had the world listened sooner. so, i would like to leave it t