In my opinion this is not personal enough to be a memoir but is, rather, a chronicle, as the author tries to describle people and events outside of and bigger than himself. He was a member of the Polish Underground and a Righteous Gentile who tried to save the lives of Polish Jews and also provide weapons and other assistance to the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

One statement struck me hard: "The battle...was not an act of desperation chosen for lack of other options. The opposite was in fact true: the chief organizers and leaders of the uprising were people who could easily have saved their own lives, who had secure contacts with the Polish underground movement, and a good chance of suviving the war among the Christian Polish population. The leaders of the Jewish resistance movement made the decision to fight largely for idealistic reasons."

This statement struck me because no where else in all of my WGU reading can I recall reading anything like this. I have always seen the uprising portrayed as the result of the only choice the Jews had: dying their way or the Germans' way, because survival was impossible. If the ghetto fighters really did fight for "idealistic" rather than practical reasons, one must needs look at it in an entirely different light.

I will try to find out more about this Bartoszewski person. I had never heard of him before I found this book, and I want to see if I can find other sources to back up his claims about being so deep in the Polish Underground, etc., and see if he had the knowledge and experience necessary to make such sweeping judgments about the WGU. ( )