“I eat, live, sleep, dress in everything that I earned myself,” said Fridman, 19, whose father, Mikhail Fridman, has a $13.7 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The junior Fridman returned to Moscow last year after graduating from a high school near London. Five months ago, he started SF Development, a distributor with five employees and $405,000 of revenue. Another business distributes hookah products to Moscow restaurants. And then there’s BloggerPass, an online marketing platform that’s set to debut next month.

While he’s striking out on his own without interference from his father, Alexander is certainly benefiting from his connections. SF Development distributes products to his father’s retail shops, in addition to other clients. Fridman doesn’t see it that way, saying managers won’t put goods on the shelves just because he’s the owner’s son.

This privileged form of entrepreneurship still stands out in a country where business titans often employ their children to teach them the nuances of doing business in Russia. Olga Rashnikova, 42, the daughter of steel tycoon Victor Rashnikov is on the board of his Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works. Andrey A. Guryev, 37, is chief executive officer of Phosagro, a fertilizer maker founded by his father, Andrey G. Guryev.

Then there are those who already are transferring fortunes to their heirs. Last year, steel magnate Alexey Mordashov, 54, handed $1.7 billion of his holdings to sons Kirill and Nikita. Vladimir Evtushenkov, 71, gave a 5% stake in publicly traded Sistema PJSC to his son Felix. Billionaire Leonid Fedun, 63, turned over $1.4 billion of his holding in Lukoil PJSC to his children, Anton and Ekaterina.

Globally, the ultra-rich are preparing to embark on the largest wealth transfer in history. Russia stands out because the country’s legal framework offers little support to those seeking to pass down fortunes. Instead, its business environment depends on informal agreements and guarantees.

“My father told me that in our country business and politics are deeply intertwined,” said Alexander, adding that his dad always told him that he plans to transfer his wealth to charity. “I lived with the understanding that I wouldn’t inherit any fortune.”

Mikhail Fridman is one of founders of Alfa Group, which he started with two college classmates, German Khan and Alexey Kuzmichev, in the last days of communism.

Now the investment company owns stakes in Alfa Bank, Russia’s fifth-largest lender, and X5, the country’s biggest food retailer. In 2013, he co-founded LetterOne to invest the $14 billion his company reaped from the sale of their oil venture with BP to Kremlin-controlled Rosneft PJSC.

Fridman is also known as one of Russia’s toughest businessmen.

“We run our business aggressively but fairly,” Alexander Fridman said in response to a question about what lessons he’s learned from his father. “My father also always said to me: ‘I have partners in every project. If you want to earn, you should be able to share.'”

The younger Fridman was planning to attend New York University’s Stern School of Business in September, but decided to take a gap year. Now he’s considering whether to forgo NYU entirely to devote himself to his companies full time.

“I have friends who graduated from Yale and are 23 years old now and who earn $80,000 to $100,000 working 16 hours a day,” he said. “You can earn more money, and in a more clever way.”

Q: What are your favorite house plants that are low maintenance, attractive and good for the home environment?

A: I love sansevieria, or snake plants. I have several at home. They are not at all fussy: They don’t require a lot of water, can handle different light conditions (though are best in partial light), and can handle some neglect. Chinese money plants (Pilea peperomioides) are also easy to grow and have been popping up at all the cool plant stores.

Q: My room doesn’t get much direct sunlight, but I’d like to get some plants to liven it up. I don’t have enough light for flowers. I know plants are huge now, but it seems like every Instagram, blog or magazine feature I look at includes things like snake plants, fiddle-leaf figs, etc. How do I find things that aren’t also in everyone else’s house?

A: The good news about the popularity of houseplants is that there are many more available. What about plants with colored foliage? If your room gets some light (four to five hours), try a begonia or peperomia. They have incredible foliage that looks great all the time.

Q: While visiting Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, I fell in love with florist’s cyclamen. On a whim, I bought a pink one at the grocery store. The tag says to give it plenty of sun and to water it regularly. Other than that, do you have any more helpful advice about caring for my four-inch potted plant?

A: I love cyclamens; they offer a burst of color in the winter. But they can be a little demanding. A little like Goldilocks, they don’t like it too hot or too cold, preferring 60-degree temperatures, which I know is not ideal at home. Water it about once a week; test the soil, and if it’s wet, hold off a little longer. When you do water, bring the plant to the sink and give it a long drink until the water flows out the drainage hole.

Q: I live in Delaware. Are there certain species of trees that are better for the environment, besides native trees?

A: A native tree is often the best choice. They have adapted with your environment, so they don’t need a lot of extra fuss to thrive, they support pollinators and they’re beautiful. You can find a tree that works well in your area by plugging in your ZIP code at the Arbor Day Foundation’s website (arborday.org).

Q: Is there an eco-friendly cleaner for wood floors that can stand up to teenagers and a dog?

A: I’m a big fan of vinegar and water. I think it’s the best for cleaning floors.

Q: We just cleaned out a house that was occupied by the same family for 67 years. In the process, we found tons of photos of the children, the aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents, both maternal and paternal, and snapshots that fill boxes and boxes. What do we do with them? Should we digitize them and put them on CDs? If so, how do I digitize them? We can’t have 30 boxes of photos sitting around.

A: What a treasure trove of family history. Do you have access to a scanner? You could scan the photos and share them with your family.

Q: I’ve been stalling on buying reusable bags for the kids’ lunches, as they sometimes forget and throw them away. Do you have any recommendations for ones that are reasonably priced? We all take our lunches every day.

A: What about using reusable containers instead of bags for your kids? They might be less likely to throw them away. They have all different sizes for snacks – even ones that fit sandwiches.

Q: I use linen napkins for my household and for when guests come. We use napkin rings the old-fashioned way – so we can tell our napkins apart when we use them for more than one meal. They get washed every few days or after one use if they are particularly messy. But not everywhere has abundant water. How do you tell when it’s better to wash or use disposable? One of our nearby government complexes is heated in large part by trapped methane from a landfill, so it doesn’t seem as simple an equation as “reusable is always better.”

A: I like your idea about using napkin rings to differentiate napkins. There are some things you can do to cut back on resources for your reusables, such as collecting rainwater, making sure your dishwasher and washer are full before running them, and really watching how much water you use.

Q: Why are so many manufacturers of, for example, soy milk, now packaging in the rounded-at-the-bottom plastic containers instead of the old paper cartons? Even at Whole Foods I see nothing but plastic.

A: Why don’t you write the manufacturers to find out? Or start a social media campaign to encourage them to switch from plastic. They will listen to consumers; they depend on us.

Q: I make my own cleaner with white vinegar and next will tackle making laundry detergent. What other things can we do to cut down on toxins and plastic use?

A: There are BioBags that are compostable in an industrial composter. You could give them a try.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that Zofia and Andrzej Pilecki found out their father was a hero. As teens in postwar Poland, they had been told he was a traitor and an enemy of the state, and they listened to news reports about his 1948 trial and execution on the school radio.

In fact, Witold Pilecki was a Polish resistance fighter who voluntarily went to Auschwitz to start a resistance, and he sent secret messages to the Allies, becoming the first to sound the alarm about the true nature of Nazi Germany’s largest concentration and extermination camp.

Auschwitz was liberated 75 years ago on Monday. In a new book, “The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz,” former war correspondent Jack Fairweather unearths the story of Pilecki’s heroism.

Pilecki (pronounced peh-LET-skee) was born into an aristocratic Polish farming family in 1901. As a young man, he fought against the Soviets in the Polish-Soviet War, earning citations for gallantry. Upon inheriting the family land, he took up the life of a country gentleman, married and had two children.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 at the start of World War II, Pilecki was called back to military service. But Poland fell in less than a month, split by the Nazis and the Soviets. Pilecki went into hiding and joined the burgeoning Polish resistance.

“The French resistance is so famous, but in actual fact, over half of all the intelligence from continental Europe to reach London came from the Polish underground,” Fairweather said in an interview with The Washington Post. “It was the biggest operation in Europe, and they provided the highest-quality intelligence – much prized by the Allies – about German capacity and war production.”

As the Nazi occupation’s grip tightened on Polish Jews, some Poles turned against Jews, too, while many others secretly helped their Jewish neighbors. The leader of Pilecki’s resistance cell pushed to make the group Catholic-only. Pilecki was a Catholic, but he argued against the change and pushed successfully to unite the group with a mainstream resistance cell that believed in equal rights for Jews.

“When (the Nazis) are doing their best to try and atomize society and break down the bonds between Poles, Pilecki doesn’t turn inwards, he doesn’t retreat into his ethnicity or his class,” Fairweather said. “He actually does the complete opposite, and begins to reach out to those around him.”

Then Pilecki got his first big mission: get arrested and sent to Auschwitz. At the time, the site run by Germany in occupied Poland was known to be a Nazi work camp for Polish prisoners of war. Pilecki was to gather information about conditions inside and organize a resistance cell, perhaps even an uprising.

The dangerous mission was voluntary; he could have refused. On Sept. 18, 1940, he placed himself in the middle of a Gestapo sweep and was sent to Auschwitz.

Nothing could have prepared him for the brutality he found. As he leaped out of a train car with hundreds of other men, he was beaten with clubs. Ten men were randomly pulled from the group and shot. Another man was asked his profession; when he said he was a doctor, he was beaten to death. Anyone who was educated or Jewish was beaten. Those remaining were robbed of their valuables, stripped, shaved, assigned a number and prison stripes, and then marched out to stand in the first of many roll calls.

“Let none of you imagine that he will ever leave this place alive,” an SS guard announced. “The rations have been calculated so that you will only survive six weeks.”

The mass gassings that came to define the Holocaust had yet to begin, but the crematorium was up and running. The only way out of Auschwitz, another guard said, was through the chimney.

Thus began 2½ years of misery. As Pilecki and other prisoners starved, lice and bedbugs feasted on them. Typhus outbreaks regularly ranged through the camp. Work assignments were exhausting. Guards delighted in punishing them. Prisoners, in desperation, stole from and betrayed one another for scraps. Many killed themselves by leaping into the electrified fence.

But slowly, Pilecki organized his underground. At first it was just a few men he knew from before. In the end, there were nearly a thousand. They formed a network to steal and distribute food and extra clothing, sabotage Nazi plans, hide injured and sick prisoners, and improve morale with a sense of brotherhood and regular news from the outside world.

“With almost a thousand men by 1942, and – barring for one incident with a Gestapo spy – not one of Pilecki’s men betrayed each other, in extraordinary circumstances of starvation and violence,” Fairweather said. “He built something really powerful in that camp.”

Starting in October 1940, the underground worked together to smuggle messages to the resistance outside. The first was sent via prisoner Aleksander Wielopolski. In Auschwitz’s early days, a few prisoners were able to secure their release if their families paid big enough bribes. Wielopolski was one of those few. Rather than risk smuggling out a paper report, Pilecki had him memorize it.

Once free, Wielopolski passed the message on to Pilecki’s friends in the resistance. Pilecki never knew whether his reports reached the Allies, but Fairweather and his researchers were able to track down how they were smuggled across Europe to the highest levels in London.

His first message was blunt: Bomb Auschwitz. Even if it meant killing everyone inside, himself included, it would be merciful. Conditions were horrifying, and the Nazis had to be stopped, he implored.

The British considered Pilecki’s request in early 1941, Fairweather found, but ultimately decided against it. The United States had not yet entered the war, and the British Royal Air Force was down to fewer than 200 planes, all of which lacked radar. It would have stretched the limits of their fuel capacity. And the British had no precedent to take action for humanitarian reasons.

Over the next two years, Pilecki continued to send messages to London via risky escapes by his men and notes passed to Polish farmers neighboring the camp.

Each message was more dire: The Nazis were conducting disgusting medical experiments on patients in the camp hospital. The Nazis killed thousands of Soviet POWs in a mass execution. The Nazis were testing a way to gas prisoners en masse. The camp was expanding. Huge trainloads of Jews were being gassed and cremated. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were being murdered.

“Pilecki, by recording every step of the camp’s evolution towards the Holocaust, he was in some ways grappling with the very essence of the Nazi’s evil before anyone else,” Fairweather said.

Pilecki kept asking: Couldn’t the Allies at least bomb the train lines leading to the gas chambers? Or create a distraction so the prisoners could try to rise up and escape?

Fairweather said he gained a lot of sympathy for the British from their initial decision not to bomb the camp. But later, when the United States joined the war, bringing a far superior air force, continuing that decision “becomes untenable,” he said. The Allies fell back on the original decision without considering that both the necessity and their capabilities had changed.

Not bombing Auschwitz is “one of history’s great might-have-beens,” Fairweather said.

By spring 1943, it was clear the Allies weren’t going to help the prisoners of Auschwitz. Without any outside help, an uprising would never succeed. Increasingly frail and in danger of being found out, Pilecki decided it was time for him to leave.

It took months to plan, but he and two friends pulled off an incredible escape through the camp bakery in the early hours of April 27. From there, he sneaked into Warsaw, where he was briefly reunited with his wife and children.

Pilecki began working for the resistance again, but the symptoms of what we might now call post-traumatic stress disorder dragged him down. He “struggled to connect” with his friends and family, according to Fairweather, and wrote day and night about the horrors he had witnessed. He even returned to Auschwitz after the war, where he found other former prisoners living in their old barracks and giving tours to the curious.

In the summer of 1944, the Soviets were advancing on the German army, pushing them westward and out of Poland. The Polish resistance hoped to kick the Germans out of Warsaw ahead of the Soviets’ arrival to re-establish a sovereign state. Pilecki was one of thousands who fought in the Warsaw Uprising, the largest action taken by a European resistance group in World War II. In the end, the Soviets held back their advance so the Nazis could crush the Poles. Then they swooped in and took over.

The Soviets liberated Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945. By then, 1.1 million people had been killed there, most of them Jews.

“For a lot of us in the West, we think of May 1945 as the end of the Second World War in Europe, and parades and so on,” Fairweather said. “Pilecki’s story is a powerful reminder that what happened in Eastern Europe was the Allies gave (Soviet leader Joseph) Stalin a free hand to occupy and subjugate half of continental Europe. And the war didn’t end for so many people.”

Poland would spend the next four decades as a communist puppet state behind the Iron Curtain. But Pilecki didn’t see much of it. He remained loyal to the idea of a free Polish republic and continued sending messages to British intelligence. He was arrested by communist authorities in 1947, tortured repeatedly and executed as an enemy of the state the next year.

According to a Polish newspaper, as he was led to his death, he said, “I’ve been trying to live my life so that in the hour of my death I would rather feel joy than fear.”

Pilecki’s reports remained hidden away in Polish archives until the 1990s. Now he has been showered with posthumous awards and hailed as the hero he was. A documentary about him is scheduled for release this year.

He is also a symbol of the way many Poles were forced to bury their war experiences for decades, Fairweather said, comparing it to if the American heroes of D-Day had been treated as traitors and pariahs.

That reckoning continued as leaders from all over the world gathered in Israel on Thursday to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz. In attendance was Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has recently spread misinformation about the Poles during World War II. He was given a top speaking role at the ceremony, prompting Polish President Andrzej Duda to boycott the event.

Duda is expected to attend a commemoration ceremony at Auschwitz on Monday. Zofia and Andrzej, now 86 and 88, will not be there, Fairweather said – they prefer to honor their father on the day of his execution. For years under communism, Zofia would light a candle alone outside the prison walls where her father was killed. Last year, hundreds of people joined her.