Matthew Parker

Partisan Account

Warsaw Boy: A Memoir of a Wartime Childhood

By

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’.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    • In this month's 'Silenced Voices', looks at the case of Azimjon Askarov, the journalist and human rights… ,
    Follow Us