'Mila 18' by Leon Uris

I said that I would love to read another novel by Leon Uris and I got the opportunity. This was on par for what I would expect from a piece with the name Uris on the binding. It was long, 800 plus pages, and a brilliant mesh of that which is called, or at least I will call, Narrative Fiction. This story was greatly focused upon the uprising of Polish Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. In the previous novel I read ('Exodus') the plots flashed occasionally back and followed the preceding events encompassing a number of generations. This novel really honed in the the 3 or so years directly preceding and including the invasion of Poland by the Nazis and the subsequent treatment of the Jewish Poles.

We are all well aware of the horrific massacre of Jews at the hands of the Nazis and this story pointed out all the specific atrocities involved with Jews not yet sent to Concentration Camps. Without the straight-forward annihilation, the treatment of Jews in Ghettos was equally terrific.

The characters jump off the page and we see so deeply into what drives them that we feel empathetic even for the antagonists pushed to unthinkable acts, in the pursuit of survival.

This novel follows the families of Andrei Androfski, his sister Deborah's family, and Christopher De Monti. Under the umbrella of these central characters we also gain insight into Gabriela Rak (Androfski's love interest), Paul Bronski, (Deborah's husband) the Bronski Children and their subsequent love interests (Rachael and Stephen and Rachael's lover Wolf Brandel). Most chapters open with a "Journal" passage from Alex Brandel, the primary historian recording the horrors endured by the Jews of the ghetto and his family is inextricably woven into the progress of the plot.

Beginning with Poles prepared to fight and repel the Nazis and ending with the complete liquidation of the Ghetto this story takes the reader through all the ups and downs the struggle for world recognition and, above all, the survival of the actual events that transpired.

I will need to get my hands on more Uris, he has me in awe.