Nine Lives: Ethnic Conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian Borderlands
Written by Waldemar Lotnik with Julian Preece
Foreword by Neal Ascherson
By any standards, Waldemar Lotnik's experience of the Second World War was remarkable. Fighting in the Polish Resistance, his unit was engaged in a bitter ethnic conflict with pro-Nazi Ukrainians. Unknown in the West, this struggle was, like that raging at the same time between the Serbs and Croats, provoked by the Nazis arming one ethnic group and unleashing it against a rival. Lotnik describes his part in a war of terror and counter-terror which claimed at least half a million lives with total and sometimes frightening candor.
Captured by the Germans, he was taken to the Majdanek concentration camp. There he carted corpses to the crematorium and, like every inmate, fought a day-by-day battle for survival. When the camp was liberated, Lotnik volunteered for the new "Red" Polish Air Force, and, while training to fly, was recruited by the Soviet security service, the NKVD, to inform on his comrades. After deserting, he joined the Polish Home Army, which in the summer of 1945 was fighting a desperate but doomed battle against the country's new occupiers. With the Soviets' victory never seriously in doubt, he escaped to the West to begin a new life.
Nine Lives offers a brutally frank account of ethnic warfare which has striking parallels with recent conflicts in the Balkans and also describes a major "sideshow" to the Second World War which is virtually unknown outside Eastern Europe.
"An unforgettable book. . . one of the most tragic and horrifying memoirs to emerge from the Second World War."
NEAL ASCHESON
"An exceptional book . . . tells a story from a perspective we rarely, if ever, are able to see."
Literary Review
WALDEMAR LOTNIK was born in 1925 near Lublin, where he was brought up on his grandfather's farm until he was seven. His parents then fetched him to live in Kremenets, a garrison town in the Polish part of the Ukraine. After the events described in this book, he settled in London where he still lives. He is married with two children and four grandchildren and has not been back to Poland since he left in 1945.
JULIAN PREECE was born in Birmingham in 1962 and brought up in Somerset. He studied German and French at Oxford and now teaches German and Comparative Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and is the author of Gunter Grass and the Germans: Literature, History, Politics.
Publishing House: Serif Publishing, London 1999
SoftCover book measuring 5.4" x 8.4"
224 pages, map
English Language Version
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