The book thereby gives a comprehensive overview of the fate of Poland from 1939 to 1945.
Carol, with respect this is from one person's point of view and we have to be careful when talking about history and people's interpretation of it.
In eastern Poland Jewish and Ukraine pointed out Polish military family and even assited in arrest/deportation.
In Kurów, near Puławy my wife's grandmother was a nurse for the Polish underground in the Second World War, and told a story of 23 Jews that were given up by the local people to protect themselves.
What I am trying to say is you never know what you will do in that situation to protect your family, and it is too easy for us to apportion blame looking back from our modern comfortable world.
My wife's grandmother was also given up by local people because she was a single woman and had a wounded Polish soldier in her house and some locals disapproved of this because of a single woman and man in the living in the same house together.
She spent the next 18 months in Majdanek concentration and extermination camp, standing in line each morning waiting for the tap on her shoulder that meant it was her time to die.
Luckily that tap never came!!
But she went back to the village of Kurów after the war and found the person who gave her up and asked her why.
The woman had a young child who was very ill and needed medicine and it was the only way that she could find a way to get the medicine.
My wife's grandmother asked if it saved the child and the woman replied it did, and my wife's grandmother said it was worth it then.
We only found out this story last year after her death, because she would never talk about the reason she was sent to Majdanek to protect the woman's family, and the woman told my wife's family after the funeral.
As I said it is too easy to blame people from the past nowadays without knowing all the facts, and books can only act as a guide, but never take them as fact because too often they are tainted by a person’s experience.