The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery, by Captain Witold Pilecki, translated by Jarek Garlinski and published in the U.S. by Aquila Polonica Publishing, has won the 2012 PROSE Award for Biography & Autobiography. The award was announced on the 7th of February 2013
The 37th annual PROSE Awards—the American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence—were presented at the Association of American Publishers’ Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. PROSE honors the best in professional and scholarly publishing, as judged by peer publishers, librarians and academics. This year’s competition attracted 518 entries: books, reference works, journals and electronic products in more than 40 categories.
Aquila Polonica president Terry Tegnazian commented:
We’re thrilled that The Auschwitz Volunteer won the 2012 PROSE Award for Biography & Autobiography. [...] We’re especially pleased that this award will help bring recognition to an incredible story of heroism which was suppressed for decades by the communists - the firsthand report of Polish Army officer Witold Pilecki, who volunteered for an almost certainly suicidal secret undercover mission as a prisoner at Auschwitz in order to tell the world what was happening there, and to build a resistance organization among the prisoners.
With calm deliberation, at 6 am on a September morning, Witold Pilecki, an army officer and a man with a wife and two children, walked into a German street round-up in Warsaw… and became Auschwitz Prisoner No. 4859. He had volunteered for a secret mission: smuggle out intelligence about the new German concentration camp in occupied Poland at Oświęcim - the village called Auschwitz by the Germans - and helped build a resistance organisation amongst the prisoners. Barely surviving some three years of starvation, disease and brutality, Pilecki accomplished his mission before escaping in April 1943.
His clandestine intelligence reports from the camp, received by the Allies as early as 1941, were among the first eyewitness evidence of the system of atrocity being established at Auschwitz.
The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery, published by Aquila Polonica in April 2012, is the translation of the third, most comprehensive of Pilecki's firsthand report, written in 1945. The book also enjoyed a special presentation and a discussion hosted by the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust on the 9th of January 2013, co-organised by the Polish Cultural Institute New York, in collaboration with Aquila Polonica.
Aquila Polonica Publishing is dedicated to publishing in English the Polish experience of the Second World War in first-hand accounts, memoirs, photographs, artwork, poetry, literature and historical studies.
The Association of American Publishers (AAP), which presented the award for the publication of Pilecki’s report, is a national trade association representing 300 premier U.S. publishers of high-quality scholarly, professional, education and entertainment content with an international distribution.
Editor: SRS
Source: Aquila Polonica Publishing, Polish Cultural Institute in New York