A MATCH MADE IN HELL: The Jewish Boy and the Polish Outlaw Who Defied the Nazis

Rarely has the old saw about war making strange bedfellows been more appropriate than in this story of a small 16-year-old Jewish boy and one of rural Poland's most notorious criminals, Jan Kopec. Stillman has found a very different kind of Holocaust story, full of drama and adventure. When Hitler's army invaded Poland in 1939, Goldner and his rural Jewish family were spared from immediate roundup. But by 1943, he had witnessed his mother and sister being herded onto a train and been left for dead beneath his father's body, both of them shot and bayoneted by a collaborator who had been one of his father's childhood friends. After Kopec, Goldner's unlikely rescuer, nursed him back to health, the pair began an 18-month partnership in which Kopec received money from partisans for having Goldner carry out acts of sabotage against the Nazis. His small size, courage and ability to learn—Kopec trained his young charge in marksmanship, a renegade German soldier taught him fluent German and a Gypsy trained him in hand-to-hand combat—resulted in impressive victories for area partisans. Goldner blew up trains and bridges used by the Nazi army and photographed Jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Stillman has done a remarkable job tracking down what little documentation exists in order to corroborate Goldner's unique story, making a trip to the region, meeting with former neighbors and with the children and grandchildren of Jan Kopec. (Nov.)