PARTISANS AND PATRIOTSThey refuse to bow to tyranny when their homelands fall to Adolf Hitler's Fascism. They fight back with no thought for themselves, with no weapons stronger than their daring and their courage. Werner Brandt, a rebel against Nazism, is sent to a reformatory for insubordination, then conscripted into the German army. He deserts in Poland and joins the Polish Resistance. He leads a group of partisans and fights alongside the legendary Major Hubal in southern Poland. Bram Edelstein's Jewish family seek safety in Paris. When the Germans overrun France, Bram joins the French Resistance and engages in daring acts of sabotage. His sister Rona flees to Poland and risks her life in helping rescue children from the Warsaw ghetto. When her mother is arrested as a spy, Ania Olenski escapes to her uncle's home on the border of Ukraine and fights with Russian partisans against Germans retreating from the Eastern Front. Erich and Roksana Brandt smuggle a young Jew out of Warsaw. Sentenced to separate concentration camps, they endure the brutal barbarity of the death camps of Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. With no help from the Allies, the heroes of this novel and the downtrodden but intrepid people of Poland converge on devastated Warsaw and face with defiance the overwhelming might of the German army. "When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death-that is heroism." So quoted the American orator Robert Green Ingersoll. Partisans and Patriots celebrates that will, that duty, and that honor.
