A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

My internet rabbit hole on pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe and the Guinea Pig Club (WWII aviators who were burned and got reconstructive surgery) produced a remarkable amount of !!! from Wikipedia alone. A number of them had distinctly "you can't make this shit up" lives. (There's also one who possibly did make some shit up.)

For your interest, I present some of my favorite bits.

I had a row with a German.

Tom Gleave

"Gleave was shot down on his first sortie after restoration of his command, on 31 August 1940, and badly burned. Initially treated at Orpington Hospital, he regained consciousness underneath a bed during an air raid. His wife was called to his bedside and asked the heavily bandaged Gleave "what on earth have you been doing with yourself?" "I had a row with a German" was his characteristically laconic reply."



If you click through to just one article, make it this one.

Alois Šiška

This guy's story is incredible from beginning to end. Here's ONE section:

"Šiska was a member of an illegal cell through which he helped Jews and others escape to Poland and later to Hungary. He remained in the republic until the outbreak of war. At that time, fear grew that the Germans would discover a hidden prototype of the Z-XIII aircraft. In order not to fall into their hands, it was decided within the illegal group that the prototype must fly to the Balkans. However, this plan failed.

Together with Alois Bača, they fled across the frozen river Morava to Slovakia, then with the help of a Hungarian pastor, they crossed the Slovak-Hungarian border and continued by train to the border with Yugoslavia. There they were arrested by a Hungarian border guard and imprisoned in Hodmezövasárhely prison for several weeks. After a failed escape attempt, they were deported to the Citadella in Budapest.

Here they were held in harsh conditions together with another hundred and twenty Czechs and a similar number of Poles. An opportunity to escape did not come until 30 March 1940, when Šiška reported to the doctor suffering from scabies. He managed to escape his guards and took a taxi to the French consulate."

Now imagine that sequence of getting captured and imprisoned, then escaping repeating several more times, interspersed with a shipwreck, a lengthy life raft survival situation, and only escaping getting his feet amputated because he seemingly dropped dead.

This line in his Wikipedia entry caused me some confusion when I attempted to search for his memoir: Šiška authored the book No Response KX-B.



The OTHER pilot who flew in combat with two prosthetic legs.

Colin Hodgkinson

This guy had both his legs amputated, then returned to being a fighter pilot! There were at least two men who did this during WWII.

"On 24 November 1943, during a high-altitude weather reconnaissance mission from 11.50, in Amiens area his oxygen supply failed 6 m E. of Hardelot, causing him to crash land in a field. He was dragged from his burning Spitfire by two farm workers, losing an artificial leg in the process. For the next 10 months he was held in Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp, before being repatriated and deemed "no further use to his country". He was again treated by McIndoe and he continued to fly until his release from service in 1946."



On the bright side, a shell severed the control lever and the throttle got stuck on open.

Eric Lock

"On 8 November 1940 his Spitfire was badly damaged during a skirmish with several Bf 109s over Beachy Head in East Sussex. The Spitfire was so badly damaged that Lock crash-landed in a ploughed field, but was able to walk away. On 17 November 1940 No. 41 Squadron attacked a formation of 70 Bf 109s that were top cover for a bomber raid on London. After shooting down one Bf 109, and setting another on fire, Lock's Spitfire was hit by a volley of cannon shells, which severely injured Lock's right arm and both legs.

The rounds also knocked the throttle permanently open by severing the control lever. The open throttle enabled the Spitfire to accelerate swiftly to 400 mph, leaving the Bf 109s in his wake, without Lock having to attempt to operate it with his injured right arm.

At 20,000 feet (6,100 m) he began to descend and with little control and no means of slowing the fighter down, he could not execute a safe landing; being too badly injured to parachute to safety, Lock was in a perilous situation. After losing height to 2,000 feet (610 m), Lock switched the engine off and found a suitable crash site near RAF Martlesham Heath, Suffolk, into which he glided the stricken fighter for a "wheels down" landing.

Lying in the aircraft for some two hours, he was found by two patrolling British Army soldiers and carried two miles (3 km) on an improvised stretcher made of their Enfield rifles and Army issue winter coats—made after instruction from Lock. By this point, Lock had lost so much blood that he was unconscious, and so unable to feel the additional pain of being dropped three times, once into a dyke of water."

Like the war wasn't bad enough.

Jackie Mann.

"Jackie Mann, CBE, DFM was a Royal Air Force fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, who in later life was kidnapped by Islamists in Lebanon in May 1989 and held hostage for more than two years."

A single swipe of a spade.

Richard Pape

"He became a sergeant navigator in a Short Stirling bomber. On a 1941 mission he was shot down close to the German/Dutch border, was twice captured and twice escaped. Following his second capture he was tortured by the Gestapo. He was repatriated by the Germans on health grounds in 1944.

In November of that year he was on a retraining course when he was burnt in a drunken motorcycle accident on the Isle of Man, which led to his being hospitalised at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, for pioneer plastic surgery under Archibald McIndoe: he thus became a member of the Guinea Pig Club."

Also, he was mad at the Beatles.

An Amazon review of his book: Time and time again I thought that what I was reading did not have a ring of truth about it, and in some cases the account was simply unbelievable. A good example of the latter is a story of a fight between two prisoners where one cuts off the other's head with a single swipe of a spade.



Wait for the last line.

Mollie Lentaigne was not a member of the club herself, but a nurse and artist on the medical staff.

"Lentaigne worked as a Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, West Sussex, where her duties included drawing the experimental operations of Archibald McIndoe and his fellow surgeons. She needed to work quickly in the operating theatre and so used pencil but subsequently added ink and colour to some of her work.

Around 300 of Lentaigne's drawings have been preserved at the East Grinstead Museum, as the Mollie Lentaigne Collection. After the surviving Guinea Pig Club members used social media to search for Lentaigne and found her living in Zimbabwe, she returned to East Grinstead in 2013 to be reunited with her work."

She was 93 at the time, and is still alive at the age of 103.

My opponent fell, shot through the head, one hundred and fifty feet behind our line. His machine gun was dug out of the ground and it ornaments the entrance to my dwelling.

The memoir of the Red Baron himself, the greatest flying ace of WWI, with 80 planes shot down. He painted his plane red, and the pilots in his squadron also painted theirs, so they were known as the flying circus. (If you thought clowns were scary...) He won a ton of medals, was a celebrity at the time, ordered trophy cups to be made for himself to commemorate his victories, and collected bits of the planes he shot down to decorate his room.

He was shot in the head while flying, but returned to duty with a bandage covering a wound that exposed his skull. At the age of 25 he was shot through the heart, probably by an Australian rifleman, while chasing a very inexperienced Canadian pilot.

Von Richthofen's memoir is quite short. It recounts his early life and how he began in the cavalry and then became an observer before becoming a fighter pilot. There's some good anecdotes of funny occurrences and snapshot portraits of other pilots, plus some dog stories which remarkably do not all end tragically. He endearingly refers to another pilot's dog as "doggie" and to his own enormous hound as "my lap-dog." (Given that, he might have been more amused than offended by Snoopy's battles with the Red Baron.)

He wasn't a good pilot immediately, and struggled with it early on. He's very dismissive of acrobatics and says that courage and a cool head is much more important than being a fancy flyer or even a good shot, noting that Boelke was a terrible shot on the ground but a master in the air. The bright, individually painted planes of his circus wasn't done as a showoff or intimidation tactic (though it definitely became the latter) but because you can't camouflage a plane in the air anyway, so it made more sense for his squadron to be individually recognizable to each other as they knew each other's strengths and weaknesses, and could make use of that when fighting.

But most of the book goes basically like this: "I bagged an Englishman today. He was my 33rd. I was very happy. I ordered a silver trophy cup to commemorate it, and I took the aeroplane's serial number and put it up in my bedroom."

He was an enthusiastic hunter, and he writes about combat exactly as if he was writing about hunting animals for sport. It's especially noticeable because he enjoys hunting on his days off, so you get an account of shooting a bison and an account of shooting a man and they're identical in all but the details.

He doesn't hate his enemies, and he respects the ones who fight well. When he lands beside a plane he downed where both pilot and observer are uninjured, he's pleased to be able to talk with them. (The best hunters respect their prey and appreciate their qualities even as they stalk them.)

I've read war memoirs where people take trophies, enjoy the adrenaline rush of combat, or find war an overall good and rewarding experience--that's all pretty common--and I've read a couple, mostly by colonial-era Englishmen, who find war a tremendously fun game. But I've never read anything quite like this. It's like "The Most Dangerous Game" from the point of view of the hunters, and it takes the cake for the creepiest war memoir I have ever read.

The context for its writing is that the German government asked him to write it as propaganda. They sent him a stenographer and had him talk to her. She took down his stories, which were edited into a manuscript and apparently heavily censored. And I read it in translation. So that's already at least three layers of distance and distortion between whatever von Richthofen actually said, let alone what he actually thought, and what I read. I'd be very curious to hear from anyone who read it in the original German, because with a translation I always wonder about accuracy and tone.

If the war hadn't happened, I don't think he'd have become a serial killer; he doesn't like hunting humans more than he likes hunting animals, just equally. (For me, that made it more chilling rather than less. And also, I have read a lot of war memoirs, and this is the first one I've read where that thought even crossed my mind.) I think he'd have been your basic rich kid who spends his life hunting and playing sports, and is admired within his circle of similar friends. But the war did happen, and so his particular attributes made him ideally suited, useful, valuable, and remembered.

Von Richthofen wrote an essay about a year afterward, which is included in some editions, in which he says he regrets the "insolent" tone of his memoir and isn't finding war quite as fun anymore. I wonder how he would have felt about it all if he'd survived the war, but considering Germany's next war effort, probably it's just as well he didn't.

On the other hand, people don't change until they do. The war memoir I've read that's closest in tone to this one was Lahore to Lucknow by Arthur Lang, by an English officer in India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. It was his private diary, not intended for publication and only discovered after his death. To him, it's all a wonderful, thrilling game.

It continues in this tone right up until literally the last two pages, in which his best friend is caught in an accidental explosion and is horrifically burned but stays conscious. Lang remains with him until he dies that night. The last diary entry is a eulogy concluding by saying that his death ruined his enjoyment of the entire war. A postscript says that Lang became a public works engineer, and spent the rest of his life building roads in India.

A WWII novel in which Biggles & crew are sent to establish a base on Borneo from which to harass the Japanese forces.

Unsurprisingly, this book has a big racism issue. The local people on Borneo are stereotypical but at least they have agency and significant, sympathetic roles. Ditto for some Chinese characters. My biggest problem was more the very high level of generalized background racism.

I read this one largely because I was promised Biggles flying a plane while he has malaria, and that does happen, but between the amazing bit with Biggles flying a plane with a concussion in Biggles Sweeps the Desert and the utterly horrifying description of malaria in Little House on the Prairie, I was expecting something spectacular. Biggles flying with malaria is good but it's not in the league of either of those.

However, Biggles in Borneo does feature some actually spectacular sequences, including 1) a deadly snake in the cockpit, 2) Biggles piloting a barge like it's an airplane, 3) a rampaging mad elephant. Also, Ginger has a really great bit toward the end. Those parts were great, but overall the book was not a favorite.

In conclusion, Biggles fandom needs more malaria that's more dramatic. I recommend reading Little House on the Prairie (the single most racist Little House book, are the mosquitos also transmitting racism?) for inspiration. Also more of Biggles attempting to fly vehicles that do not fly. More dangerous animals loose on planes would also be good. And much as Dashiell Hammett suggested having a man with a gun enter if your plot is getting tedious, this book proves that another thing that really brings the excitement is a rampaging mad elephant.

This book is exactly as racist as you would expect from the title, which is especially unfortunate as it's otherwise a really good story with an unusual, clever plot. It's a wartime mystery and it's very well-done.

In WWII, Biggles and his squadron are transported in deep secrecy, finally ending up on a base in India. There's an important supply route between India and China, but planes which fly it have been crashing inexplicably. There's no apparently sabotage, nor are they getting shot down as far as anyone can tell. At some point in a routine flight, they drop out of radio contact, fly erratically for a minute or so, then crash. So far there have been no survivors, and so many men and planes have been lost that the base is having a collective nervous breakdown, with men drinking heavily and generally coming undone.

Biggles proceeds to investigate this under incredibly tense circumstances in which he or his men are liable to die any time they fly the route, all the obvious checks have already been done, and he's now in charge of men who are already burned out and ready to throw their lives away just to get it over with.

The mystery plot is great, there's some good adventure scenes, and one of the aerial battles is among his best aerial battle sequences that I've read so far - it's terrifying, horrifying, and beautifully written.

Aaaaaand also there is a lot of racism. A LOT of racism. Though at one point Biggles tells his men not to call Indians "natives" because it's discourteous. JOHNS. You were so close!

Spoilers!

( Read more... )

"I'm no lover of a camel."

This WWII adventure has a remarkable introduction by the author in which he says that most of Biggles' exploits are based on real wartime incidents, and if anything have been toned down:

Again, I should blush to dress my hero, after he had been forced to land on the wrong side of the lines, in girls' clothes, and allow him to be pestered by the unwelcome attentions of German officers for weeks before making his escape. The officer who resorted to that romantic method of escape is now in business in London. In business as WHAT?

Biggles and his crew have been sent to the desert to figure out why British planes have been disappearing while flying over that area. Adventure ensues.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot, because there's a number of really fun twists and unexpected incidents. So above the cut, I will only say that there are fantastic aerial combat sequences (Johns hopefully suggests in the introduction that perhaps Biggles' combat techniques will be helpful to readers who end up in the cockpit of a fighting aeroplane), daring rescues, daring escapes, getting lost in the desert without water, and a camel chase. As always, Johns never fails to lean into his premise; this book has absolutely everything you could possibly want from a desert-set WWII adventure.

When I picked this book up I had thought it was the one where Biggles gets in a dogfight while he has malaria, but it's actually the one where he gets in a dogfight while he has a concussion and almost passes out in the middle of it. It's a great sequence.

( Read more... )

An anonymous friend sent me this with the following delightful dad joke:

Did you know that the propeller on a small plane is actually there to keep the pilot cool? Just watch, when it stops spinning the pilot will start sweating like crazy.

Thank you, anonymous friend!

He broke into a peal of nerve-jarring laughter which ended in something like a sob. "Get me a drink somebody, please," he pleaded. "Lord! I am tired."

This is the very first Biggles book, a collection of the first Biggles short stories, set in WWI and including his first appearance in "The White Fokker." He's introduced as a teenage pilot barely holding himself together, and the whole collection is understatedly harrowing. It's also full of exciting aerial warfare, fascinating period details, and cool concepts, plus an introduction by Johns in which he describes some of the experiences that inspired the book and says that most of the stories in it are more-or-less true.

These planes, or "machines" as they're often called, were made of canvas and wood, and were flown without parachutes or radio. (Pilots used hand signals (!) or plane movements to communicate.) If you were shot down, you generally died. But if you crash-landed, you could often literally get up and walk away. At one point someone gets a ride hanging on to a wing!

Dogfighting pilots were so close at times that they could see each other's faces and even expressions, and the aces on both sides knew each other's names and some personal details. It was a weirdly intimate kind of warfare.

The stories were published individually, but they connect to form a loose narrative. The flying sequences and the general sense that death is hanging over them all and can come at any moment when they're in the air gives the book incredible tension. In "The Packet," he's the third pilot to be sent on the same mission within a matter of hours, after the first two were killed trying. He has to pick up a packet of papers that are only twenty miles away; he'll be either back or dead within the hour.

Major Raymond appears in "The Balloonatics," in which he eggs on Biggles to risk his life for six bottles of whiskey! (To be fair, there was a mission of tactical significance involved, and Biggles would have been happy to do it without the prize.) I would bet money that this more-or-less really happened. That story would have fit right in as a M*A*S*H episode.

Algy Lacey is introduced in "The Boob" and plays a major role in "The Battle of Flowers," both of which also have a M*A*S*H-like feel. He's Biggles' cousin whom his aunt arranged to send to his squadron. Biggles has less-than-fond memories of him from childhood: "His Christian names are Algernon Montgomery, and that's just what he looked like--a slice of warmed-up death wrapped in velvet and ribbons."

Algy arrives with ten hours of flying Camels under his belt, and Biggles warns him that the average lifespan of a new pilot is 24 hours, but if he survives the first week he should be all right. He's serious, too. Of course, he shows his stuff in a pleasingly unexpected manner, and turns out to be even more of a courageous lunatic than young Biggles.

Marie Janis appears in "Affaire de Couer," which establishes that Biggles' type is "honorable and attractive German spy, any gender fine."

"The Last Show" sees Biggles so far gone that he's about to be sent home before he gets himself killed, but he has one last mission he's determined to fly...

Reading this without context, it's an excellent set of atmospheric, exciting war stories with interesting hooks. Read with the context of a bunch of other Biggles books, I kept thinking, "This poor kid!" He is SEVENTEEN.

I'd already read Biggles Learns to Fly, which has a similar tone, but this one is especially good to keep in mind as his and Algy's backstory when reading other books.

I ended up reading this off the Internet Archive link because the versions I could find online were so poorly formatted. I will eventually get a hard copy (It's on my wish list and my birthday is coming up JUST SAYING) but I wanted to read it sooner. Hopefully this is not the infamous bowdlerized edition where the pilots are risking their lives to win six bottles of lemonade (originally whiskey.) I wonder if the other pilots in that edition worry about Biggles because he's gotten so depressed and burned out that he's drinking half a bottle of lemonade before breakfast!

A rare singleton from Tchaikovsky, and also a book with shockingly few bugs - I think the only bug content in the entire book is a couple giant dragonflies and a single dog-sized hairy spider that appears in exactly one scene.

In a vaguely Napoleonic time period, impoverished aristocrat Emily Marshwic lives with her two sisters, her younger brother, and her brother-in-law. Her biggest problems are her lack of money, her flighty younger sister's habit of running away every time she feels especially aggrieved, and the family feud with the mayor, Mr. Northway, whom they blame for their father's suicide after he lost all the family money.

Then war breaks out. All patriotic men of age volunteer... and mostly don't come back. A draft is instituted to scoop up the men of age who didn't volunteer. Emily's teenage brother volunteers and her brother-in-law is drafted. Then the draft is widened to encompass younger and older men. But it's still not enough. In the midst of privation and desperation, the draft is widened to include women. Rather than feeding a terrified young servant into that meatgrinder, Emily volunteers, and is sent to the swamp part of the front.

An excellent war novel and study of leadership in a horrendous war of attrition. The fantasy aspect of the book is comparatively minor--the king has a magical ability to create mages, and there are native people of the world who are not human--but it's primarily an alternate history of a war that might have been.

It's an extremely intense book, especially once you realize the reason why Emily is the main character. ( Read more... )

Emily is an unreliable narrator of the variety who tells the absolute truth as she sees it, but who may believe things that aren't correct. You can tell early on that she probably doesn't have a full picture of exactly what went down and why regarding her father's suicide, and it becomes increasingly clear that she takes the party line about the reasons for the war at face value. Which leads to another interesting (very spoilery!) aspect of the book:

( Read more... )

A vivid, suspenseful, intense, dark yet ultimately hopeful novel.

Warning for attempted rape and standard war novel content.

Here is the remarkable, untold story of how five major Hollywood directors—John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra—changed World War II, and how, in turn, the war changed them. In a move unheard of at the time, the U.S. government farmed out its war propaganda effort to Hollywood, allowing these directors the freedom to film in combat zones as never before.

Sorry, couldn't improve on the blurb for a summary. This is a fascinating account which combines many of my interests - war trauma, movies and movie-making, art vs commerce vs propaganda, Hollywood history, and Jewish history - and it's comprehensive, meticulously researched, well-written, suspenseful, and great at making the characters and their milieu come to life.

The directors made the "Why We Fight" series, were wounded by shrapnel while shooting the battle of Midway live and in color, filmed the liberation of concentration camps, and both witnessed and created a brief but important era of documentary and fictional filmmaking unlike anything before or since.

Propaganda borders on a dirty word, so this account of propaganda efforts for a generally good cause (convincing Americans that Hitler was bad and ought to be fought) is genuinely thought-provoking and made me think of the entire concept in a new light. Is propaganda bad if it's true? Is it bad if it's for a good cause? What if the other side is making its own propaganda?

I'm listening to this as a 20-hour audiobook, which is why I'm doing a write-up before finishing it. The audio is excellent. There is also a three-part Netflix documentary, which I'm wavering on whether I should watch it now (so I have visual references) or after I finish (to preserve the suspense.)

The other reason I am writing about it now is that I have to share this with someone: I am in love with William (Willy) Wyler. IN LOVE. He is my new historical crush.

Of the five directors, Wyler was the only Jew. He was happily married to a woman from Texas and they wrote each other the sweetest letters. He was a perfectionist who did way more takes than was common at that time, but not tyrannical on the set; actors sometimes butted heads with him, but loved him for getting great performances out of them. He tried his best to get family members out of France and to America, but the US wouldn't let them in. When the government started accepting filmmakers into the military to make documentaries and training films, he volunteered, but all his filmmaking equipment got lost at sea and he couldn't cut through the red tape to get more.

At the point I'm at, an officer finally realized how awesome he was and wrote a stern memo praising him and scolding the military for not letting him do his thing; he's now attached to a squad of bombers, riding along in depressurized planes so cold his cameras keep freezing, and begging the pilot over the intercom to fly a little closer to the flak so he can get better shots.

He is the best and I love him. Admittedly he looks especially good in comparison with Huston (publicly cheating on his wife), Ford (dick-swinging credit-taker), and Capra (dick-swinging vaguely right-winger). I do like Huston as a character (he and Ford are my favorite filmmakers of the bunch) but man, he was a dick to his wife.

The other director I'm very fond of is George Stevens, who previously did very professional, very fluffy comedies. He too is stoically enduring a lot of difficulties to try to get to the front. I know generally where this is going (if you want a spoiler, just take a look at his filmography) and I am listening with my heart in my mouth. He is also so nice! He loves his wife and kids! He rescues a Jewish screenwriter from getting in court martial-level trouble! (The screenwriter was refused entrance to a club, thought it was anti-Semitism, and was about to start a brawl. Stevens rushed in to explain to him that it was an officers club and he was enlisted.)

skygiants brought this book to my attention, years ago. Great rec, thanks!

Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War

Nonfiction about a brief but fateful encounter between a German ace fighter pilot and an American bomber crew, in mid-air; forty years later, the two pilots met up again. The book started out as a magazine article, and I bet it was a terrific one. It’s a great story and unlike many WWII stories, this one is about people’s best behavior rather than their worst.

As you may guess from the summary, the actual incident, though amazing, lasted about twenty minutes and is recounted in about ten pages. So most of the book is the story of the German fighter pilot, Franz Stigler, plus a much smaller amount about the American crew. (Stigler was not a Nazi and in fact came from an anti-Nazi family. I know that it would have been convenient for him to claim to have been secretly anti-Nazi after the fact, but given what he was witnessed to have done, I believe it.)

The book is is interesting if you have an interest in the subject matter, but doesn't really rise above that. The best parts, apart from the encounter itself, were the early sections on the culture and training of the German pilots. One detail that struck me (not just that it happened, but that Stigler actually told someone about it), which was that dogfighting was so terrifying that pilots regularly landed with wet pants. I'd heard that about the first time, but not that it wasn't just the first time. Just imagine doing that for months on end. And knowing that you're not likely to do it for years on end because the lifespan of a fighter pilot is probably not that long.

If you just want to know what happened in mid-air over Germany, in December, 1943, click on the cut. ( Read more... )

Does anyone have any recommendations for other books on pilots, fighters or otherwise, historical or otherwise? I've read Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and really enjoyed the combination of desperate survival narrative with odes to the joy of flight. I think I'd be more interested in memoirs by pilots than biographies about them.

A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II

Fascinating, unsettling story of three young Jewish partisans-- two women and a man-- who escaped the destruction of the Vilna ghetto and fought the Nazis from their forest hiding place. (Vilna is where my family is from. Had my ancestors not fled earlier anti-Semitic persecution, that's where I would have been during WWII. About 40,000 Jews were forced into the Vilna ghetto; a couple hundred survived.)

The heroism of women and Jews is often ignored or disbelieved, so I particularly appreciated this extensive documentation of jaw-dropping acts of courage performed as a matter of course, over a course of years, by a gentle-looking Jewish scholar and two tiny teenage Jewish girls.

While much of what the partisans did during the war was completely justified, and more falls into the "who am I to judge" category," the book continues past the war, as Abba and his allies plot what I can only describe as a horrific act of terrorism. ( Read more... )

Who am I to judge, given what they went through and witnessed? Who am I to not judge, given their intent?

Abba, the man, and Vitka and Ruzka, the women, were extremely strongly implied to have been a romantic threesome during the war; afterward, Abba and Vitka married, and lived next door to Ruzka and her husband in Israel for the rest of their lives. I can't help being glad that they got their happily-enough ever after ending.

The Avengers: A Jewish War Story