The survival of love : memoirs of a resistance officer /

Garli'nski, a Polish historian at the Polish University in Exile (London) has written extensively about WW II (Poland, S.O.E. and the Allies, London, 1969; Intercept: The Enigma War, 1979, and Poland and in Second World War, 1985). Here, in a popularly written work, he recounts his activities as a member of the Polish underground. He fought in the short war, was captured, and escaped to become an important figure in the underground movement, which was subordinated to the Polish government in exile in London. In 1943 he was betrayed to the Germans and spent the remaining years of the war as a German prisoner in the Auschwitz and Neuengamme camps. Garli'nski provides a detailed personal account of those two years. After liberation he made his way to England, where he was reunited with his Anglo-Irish wife, whom he had married days after the German invasion of Poland. Unwilling to return to a communist-dominated Poland he made his life in England, returning to Poland for the first time in 1990. General readers.-G. M. Kren, Kansas State University

From a distance of 50 years, Garlinski (author of Fighting Auschwitz and presi dent of the Union of Polish Writers Abroad) reminiscences about his wartime experiences. An officer in the Polish army and married to an Irish girl, he joined the underground when Poland was overrun, serving in the counterintelligence unit in Warsaw. His recounting of various espionage and counterespionage tales is fragmented and hard to follow. Arrested in 1943, he spent the next years in Auschwitz, Birkenau, and other camps. He describes the brutal tactics of the Germans in gory detail, but he evinces no particular compassion. In referring to an unexpected transport of 30,000 Dutch Jews who were exterminated within three days, he comments on the pervasive stink of burning bodies. The writing is stilted and fre quently idiomatically incorrect. Not a necessary purchase.-- Carol R. Glatt, VA Medical Ctr., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.