The Polish Officer

The Polish Officer PDF Author: Alan Furst
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0375758275
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
September 1939. As Warsaw falls to Hitler’s Wehrmacht, Captain Alexander de Milja is recruited by the intelligence service of the Polish underground. His mission: to transport the national gold reserve to safety, hidden on a refugee train to Bucharest. Then, in the back alleys and black-market bistros of Paris, in the tenements of Warsaw, with partizan guerrillas in the frozen forests of the Ukraine, and at Calais Harbor during an attack by British bombers, de Milja fights in the war of the shadows in a world without rules, a world of danger, treachery, and betrayal.

The Polish Officer

The Polish Officer PDF Author: Alan Furst
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0375758275
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book

Book Description
September 1939. As Warsaw falls to Hitler’s Wehrmacht, Captain Alexander de Milja is recruited by the intelligence service of the Polish underground. His mission: to transport the national gold reserve to safety, hidden on a refugee train to Bucharest. Then, in the back alleys and black-market bistros of Paris, in the tenements of Warsaw, with partizan guerrillas in the frozen forests of the Ukraine, and at Calais Harbor during an attack by British bombers, de Milja fights in the war of the shadows in a world without rules, a world of danger, treachery, and betrayal.

The Polish Officer

The Polish Officer PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781448734955
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Escaping Hell

Escaping Hell PDF Author: Kon Pierkarski
Publisher: Dundurn
ISBN: 1554881560
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Escaping Hell is the compelling and true story of a heroic young Polish officer who survived the terror of five years in the prisons of Auschwitz and Buchenwald – where violence was meaningless because human life had lost all value. During World War II, Kon Piekarski was a member of the Polish Underground Army, a clandestine resistance movement which operated even inside Auschwitz – organizing spectacular escapes, operating a secret radio network and matching wits with the Gestapo. After Auschwitz, Piekarski became a prisoner of war at Buchenwald and spent time working in a factory where Russian prisoners of war were used for labour. In the face of constant danger, he and his comrades took every possible opportunity to sabotage the German war industry. He was finally transferred to a small camp near the French border, and escaped three months before the end of the war.

A Secret Life

A Secret Life PDF Author: Benjamin Weiser
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541758366
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
In August 1972, Ryszard Kuklinski, a highly respected colonel in the Polish Army, embarked on what would become one of the most extraordinary human intelligence operations of the Cold War. Despite the extreme risk to himself and his family, he contacted the American Embassy in Bonn, and arranged a secret meeting. From the very start, he made clear that he deplored the Soviet domination of Poland, and believed his country was on the wrong side of the Cold War. Over the next nine years, Kuklinski -- code name "Jack Strong" -- rose quickly in the Polish defense ministry, acting as a liaison to Moscow, and helping to prepare for a "hot war" with the West. But he also lived a life of subterfuge -- of dead drops, messages written in invisible ink, miniature cameras, and secret transmitters. In 1981, he gave the CIA the secret plans to crush Solidarity. Then, about to be discovered, he made a dangerous escape with his family to the West. He still lives in hiding in America. Kuklinski's story is a harrowing personal drama about one man's decision to betray the Communist leadership in order to save the country he loves, and the intense debate it spurred over whether he was a traitor or a patriot. Through extensive interviews and access to the CIA's secret archive on the case, Benjamin Weiser offers an unprecedented and richly detailed look at this secret history of the Cold War.

The Spies of Warsaw

The Spies of Warsaw PDF Author: Alan Furst
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588367169
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
NOW A MINISERIES ON BBC AMERICA STARRING DAVID TENNANT An autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers’ bar in the city’s factory district, he will meet with the military attaché from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins The Spies of Warsaw, the brilliant new novel by Alan Furst, lauded by The New York Times as “America’s preeminent spy novelist.” War is coming to Europe. French and German intelligence operatives are locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attaché, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn into a world of abduction, betrayal, and intrigue in the diplomatic salons and back alleys of Warsaw. At the same time, the handsome aristocrat finds himself in a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations. Colonel Mercier must work in the shadows, amid an extraordinary cast of venal and dangerous characters–Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence; the mysterious and sophisticated Dr. Lapp, senior German Abwehr officer in Warsaw; Malka and Viktor Rozen, at work for the Russian secret service; and Mercier’s brutal and vindictive opponent, Major August Voss of SS counterintelligence. And there are many more, some known to Mercier as spies, some never to be revealed. The Houston Chronicle has described Furst as “the greatest living writer of espionage fiction.” The Spies of Warsaw is his finest novel to date–the history precise, the writing evocative and powerful, more a novel about spies than a spy novel, exciting, atmospheric, erotic, and impossible to put down. “As close to heaven as popular fiction can get.” –Los Angeles Times, about The Foreign Correspondent “What gleams on the surface in Furst’s books is his vivid, precise evocation of mood, time, place, a letter-perfect re-creation of the quotidian details of World War II Europe that wraps around us like the rich fug of a wartime railway station.” –Time “A rich, deeply moving novel of suspense that is equal parts espionage thriller, European history and love story.” –Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times, about Dark Star “Some books you read. Others you live. They seep into your dreams and haunt your waking hours until eventually they seem the stuff of memory and experience. Such are the novels of Alan Furst, who uses the shadowy world of espionage to illuminate history and politics with immediacy.” –Nancy Pate, Orlando Sentinel

In the Legions of Napoleon

In the Legions of Napoleon PDF Author: Henrich von Brandt
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1473882915
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
In the Legions of Napoleon recounts the adventures of an intrepid Polish soldier who fought for Napoleon the length and breadth of Europe. By the time he was twenty-five, Heinrich von Brandt had marched from Madrid to Moscow and had been severely wounded on three separate occasions. From 1808 to 1812 he was caught up in Napoleons attempt to subjugate Spain, fighting in battles, sieges including the siege of Saragossa and hunting and being hunted by merciless bands of guerrillas. In 1812 his unit took part in the crossing of the Niemen and the epic retreat from Moscow.In his extraordinary memoirs Brandt describes in great detail the actions in which he fought, the type of officers and men he served with, and the grueling campaigns in which they participated. He also gives fascinating insight into the minds of his comrades and superiors. This book is a must for every Napoleonic historian, enthusiast, and anyone who likes a good story of high adventure.

Dark Star

Dark Star PDF Author: Alan Furst
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307483576
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
Paris, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague, 1937. In the back alleys of nighttime Europe, war is already under way. André Szara, survivor of the Polish pogroms and the Russian civil wars and a foreign correspondent for Pravda, is co-opted by the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and becomes a full-time spymaster in Paris. As deputy director of a Paris network, Szara finds his own star rising when he recruits an agent in Berlin who can supply crucial information. Dark Star captures not only the intrigue and danger of clandestine life but the day-to-day reality of what Soviet operatives call special work.

Lost Time

Lost Time PDF Author: Jozef Czapski
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681372584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
The first translation of painter and writer Józef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II. During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier Józef Czapski brought Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and ­altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.

Ordinary Men

Ordinary Men PDF Author: Christopher R. Browning
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062037757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
The shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews.

The Spies of Warsaw

The Spies of Warsaw PDF Author: Alan Furst
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812977378
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
NOW A MINISERIES ON BBC AMERICA STARRING DAVID TENNANT War is coming to Europe. French and German intelligence operatives are locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, in Warsaw, the new military attaché, Colonel Jean-François Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn into a world of abduction, betrayal, and intrigue in the diplomatic salons and back alleys of the city. At the same time, the handsome aristocrat finds himself in a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations. Risking his life, Colonel Mercier must work in the shadows, amid an extraordinary cast of venal characters, some known to Mercier as spies, some never to be revealed.