Matthew Parker
Partisan Account
Warsaw Boy: A Memoir of a Wartime Childhood
By Andrew Borowiec
Viking 367pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
As Soviet forces entered Nazi-occupied Poland in the spring of 1944, a joke was doing the rounds in Warsaw. The Archangel Gabriel drops in and asks the first man he meets whom he hates most: the Russians or the Germans? The Pole replies, ‘When?’
‘We were not exactly spoilt for choice,’ writes Andrew Borowiec in this engaging memoir. ‘One side had given us Katyn,’ where thousands of Polish officers were shot by the Soviets, ‘and the other Auschwitz.’ Antipathy towards both, he says, was ‘almost a way of life’.
It has been the unhappy fate of Poland to be endlessly caught between competing great powers, from the three-way imperial partitions of the late 18th century to the Second World War. The Poles themselves have responded with a fatalistic, sentimental nationalism, captured in Borowiec’s comment on the Munich Agreement: ‘Unlike
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back
'To her enemies she was the alien temptress who led Charles I away from the "true religion" of Protestantism and towards royal absolutism.'
Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews @LeandadeLisle's 'colourful', 'persuasive' new biography of Henrietta Maria.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/royalist-generalissima
'Empathy is our moral portal gun, and it jams from underuse.'
Don Paterson on Portal 2, catching Covid on the Eurostar, and rereading Ian Hamilton’s 'Against Oblivion'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony