Volunteer

COSTA BOOK AWARD WINNER: BOOK OF THE YEAR • #1 SUNDAY TIMES (UK) BESTSELLER “Superbly written and breathtakingly researched, The Volunteer smuggles us into Auschwitz and shows us—as if watching a movie—the story of a Polish agent who infiltrated the infamous camp, organized a rebellion, and then snuck back out. ... Fairweather has dug up a story of incalculable value and delivered it to us in the most compelling prose I have read in a long time.” —Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and Tribe The incredible true story of a Polish resistance fighter’s infiltration of Auschwitz to sabotage the camp from within, and his death-defying attempt to warn the Allies about the Nazis’ plans for a “Final Solution” before it was too late. 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. But gathering information was not his only task: he was to execute an attack from inside—where the Germans would least expect it. The name of the camp was Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, Pilecki forged an underground army within Auschwitz that sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi informants and officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying truth that the camp was to become the epicenter of 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—an escape from Auschwitz itself. Completely erased from the historical record by Poland’s post-war Communist government, Pilecki remains almost unknown to the world. Now, with exclusive access to previously hidden diaries, family and camp survivor accounts, and recently declassified files, Jack Fairweather offers an unflinching portrayal of survival, revenge and betrayal in mankind’s darkest hour. And in uncovering the tragic outcome of Pilecki’s mission, he reveals that its ultimate defeat originated not in Auschwitz or Berlin, but in London and Washington.

The riveting story of a Canadian who serves as a senior officer in Israel’s legendary Mossad. In 1982 a young Michael Ross joins the legion of Canadian twenty-somethings backpacking in Europe. Through happenstance, he winds up working on a Kibbutz in Israel, where he falls in love with the land and its ancient, multi-layered history. He immerses himself in Israeli culture, converts to Judaism, and adopts his new country’s struggle for survival as his own, joining the Israel Defence Force and eventually Mossad’s most elite and storied covert-operations unit, Caesaria. For seven-and-a-half years, Ross worked as an undercover agent — a classic spy. In The Volunteer, he describes his role in missions to foil attempts by Syria, Libya, and Iran to acquire advanced weapons technology. He tells of his part in the capture of three senior al Qaeda operatives who masterminded the 1998 attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; a joint Mossad-FBI operation that uncovered a senior Hezbollah terrorist based in the United States; and a mission to South Africa in which he intercepted Iranian agents seeking to expand their country’s military arsenal; and two-and-a-half years as Mossad’s Counterterrorism Liaison Officer to the CIA and FBI. Many of the operations Ross describes have never before been revealed to the public. My first face-to-face encounter with the entity the world now knows as al Qaeda began on Friday, August 7, 1998, the day the group detonated truck bombs outside U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 291 innocents, including 12 U.S. citizens, and injuring over 4,500 African bystanders. On August 7, I was at home in Israel, enjoying a rare day off, but soon after the blasts, my pager went off. It was an urgent request to call the Mossad’s 24/7 communications center. I checked in by phone, then raced to HQ in my tiny Renault, running up the two flights of stairs to the counterterrorism department. There, I found Etti, an analyst in the “World Jihad” branch (known informally as the department of “awful Ahmeds”) and a few others studying the cable traffic from our liaison station in Nairobi. I noticed Etti had a cigarette going — despite the no-smoking policy at HQ, it was the sort of thing a tough old hand like Etti could get away with under these circumstances. She greeted me with her usual flurry of casual obscenities, and handed me a stack of reports that brought me up to speed. — From The Volunteer

Deep within each one of us lies the ability to step up and care for those in need, even though we often feel overwhelmed by a complex world. In fact, more than 200 million people throughout the world offer their time and love to volunteering.

Every ministry needs capable and reliable volunteers, but so often it feels like no one is coming forward to fill your church's needs. In reality, the people around us do want to volunteer their time and talents, but we often fail to connect potential volunteers to ministry opportunities or lose them somewhere along the way. The Volunteer Effect is your start-to-finish guide to recruiting, leading, and retaining volunteers for your ministry. Based on solid management theory delivered in an engaging narrative form, this book shows you how to - recruit people to a mission, not just a role - create low-risk entry points - build a team that evokes pride - train them for the bigger picture - and much more Your most effective volunteers are already in your church! Let this resource show you how to find--and keep--them.

Recent years have seen an explosion in research on tourism volunteering. Volunteers are an essential part of tourism, whether they are volunteering in their local museum, at a sporting mega-event, as an airport ambassador, or travelling the global as a volunteer tourist. Managing Volunteers in Tourism reviews the latest research to highlight the key management issues and relate them to the tourism volunteering context. It includes previously under-researched forms of tourism volunteering such as meet-and-greeters, surf life-savers, conservation, festival, and information centre volunteers and volunTourists. The book develops through three distinct sections, the first of which begins by introducing the concept of volunteering and considering the variety of volunteer forms and settings within tourism. The next part picks up the organisational approach and examines volunteer program design and planning, volunteer motivation, recruitment and selection, training and development, reward and retention, and diversity management. The final part consists of ten case studies from leading international researchers and practitioners identifying best practice and key management challenges. Real-life examples and case studies throughout this book provide an in-depth examination of the challenges facing those managing tourism volunteers, making this book indispensible for current and future managers in the tourism industry.

Museum Volunteers is a practical handbook on the use of volunteers as interpreters within museums. Drawing on key examples of outstanding practice from the UK and North America, this book forms a unique resource on volunteerism. This book: * reviews research on the changing priorities of museums * examines a form of volunteering that has provided benefits to all participants in an activity similar to museum interpretation - student tutoring * describes and analyses the strengths of five exceptional volunteer programmes in Canada and the USA * reports the finding of five volunteer programmes set up and managed by the authors in the Science Museum, London * examines the development process of the pilot studies and the consequent establishment of a permanent volunteer programme in the Science Museum, London * discusses the mutual benefits that volunteer programmes can bring to museums and volunteers * offers suggestions on the practical day-to-day management and administration of volunteers. This book is essential reading for anyone involved with the management and administration of a museum, or, is thinking of offering their services to a museum as a volunteer.

​This volume overlooks the distinct expressions and awareness of volunteering in the lived reality of people from different regions of the world. By casting the net widely this book not only expands the geographic reach of experiences, models and case studies but also transcends the conventional focus on formal volunteering. It highlights institutional forms of volunteering specific to developing nations and also describes volunteering that is more loosely institutionalized, informal, and a part of solidarity and collective spirit. As a result this book provides a different look at the values, meaning, acts and expressions of volunteering. The chapters in this book consist of essays and case studies that present recent academic research, thinking and practice on volunteering. Working from the premise that volunteering is universal this collection draws on experiences from Latin America, Africa including Egypt, and Asia. This book focuses on developing countries and countries in transition in order to provide a fresh set of experiences and perspectives on volunteering. While developing countries and countries in transition are in the spotlight for this volume, the developed country experience is not ignored. Rather the essays use it as a critical reference point for comparisons, allowing points of convergence, disconnect and intersection to emerge.