Pilecki was a sympathetic though precise observer of the fate of others; his report, skillfully translated, stands somewhere between the precious few diaries we have of camp inmates (one by the Dutch Jew David Koker has just been published as “At the Edge of the Abyss”) and the great works of memory and literature by Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski. But Pilecki’s own sustaining obsession was Polish nationhood. He insists on understanding Ausch­witz as a trial of the Polish nation, where “a man was seen and valued for what he really was.”

Pilecki’s definition of Polish identity was one of honor and dishonor. There is nothing of the ethnic nationalism that flourished in his own homeland in the 1930s nor of the zoological nationalism of the Germans who occupied that homeland. The coherence of his report lies in his concern for his comrades in the camp. “To be honest, can I write that someone was ‘much missed’?” he says of one dead friend. “I missed them all.”

Implicit in the story of Pilecki’s own survival are two others: the slow replacement of German prisoners by Poles in the lower administration of the camp, and the successful conspiracy of Pilecki’s group. In a way, these are the same story, since among the tasks of Pilecki’s comrades was to look after one another’s food allotments and work assignments. Their ultimate goal was to organize an uprising to coincide with an Allied bombing or a Polish Home Army raid, neither of which came. When Pilecki finally escaped, in April 1943, the plan involved getting a work assignment in the bakery. It worked, although Pilecki took a bullet along the way.

The two major sources of anti-Nazi resistance in wartime Europe were Communism and Polish patriotism, which were themselves inimical. Pilecki, the Polish patriot, must have known of the solidarity of Communists in Ausch­witz, but he never writes about it. For him Communism was a threat and a mistake. His homeland, after all, had been invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union simultaneously. His friends were in German and Soviet camps, and killed by both German and Soviet executioners. By the time he rejoined the Polish anti-Nazi underground in late 1943, the problem was how to fight the German occupation even as Soviet occupation again threatened.

In August 1944 Pilecki participated in the Warsaw Uprising, meant to free the Polish capital from German power before the Red Army arrived. He was one of its heroes, holding the city’s major east-west thoroughfare, Jerusalem Alley, and then an important position near the railway station. Meanwhile the Soviets halted outside Warsaw, allowing the Germans to kill more than 100,000 Poles, most of them civilians, many of them people who would have resisted Soviet rule as they resisted German rule. After the uprising was crushed and Warsaw destroyed, Pilecki was detained in a German P.O.W. camp.

Volunteering for Ausch­witz and ­remaining there for almost three years was the most courageous thing Pilecki ever did, perhaps one of the most courageous things anyone has ever done. But it was not his only deed of bravery, and not the one that killed him. At war’s end in 1945, Pilecki made for Italy, to report to the command of a Polish Army that had helped the Americans and the British defeat the Germans. He then accepted what would turn out to be his final mission.