The Road to Katyn: A Soldier's Story

The title is misleading, since Slowes, a Polish-Jewish plastic surgeon, was not among the WW II Polish POWs selected by the Soviets to be secretly slaughtered at Katyn Forest in Byelorrusia, where a mass grave of some 5000 bodies of the officer corps was discovered by the Nazis in 1943. But he was among the 15,000 Polish military personnel apprehended by the Soviets, and he was imprisoned at the Kozielsk camp--one of three POW camps--with those who would be killed at Katyn. Graves of the other 10,000 bodies presumed executed have not been found. Slowes, now settled in Israel, recalls Kozielsk campmates whose bodies were identified at Katyn, as well as other POWs, whether friends or anti-Semites, whom he met at various camps before the repatriation of Polish prisoners following Germany's attack on the U.S.S.R. in 1941. His tales of wartime misery are no less heartrending for being familiar, as he relates the squalid conditions of POW life and his later Polish army service, which took him to Iran, Iraq, Palestine and the Monte Casino campaign in Italy. The memoir provides a rare look at the defeated Polish army caught in the politics of the 1939 German-Soviet nonaggression pact and the frictions between the revived Polish military and Soviet allies. (Jan.)