A Match Made In Hell
The Jewish Boy and the Polish Outlaw
Who Defied the Nazis
by Larry Stillman
from the testamony of Morris GoldnerThe curtains go up on a memory. Our narrator remember crawling out from under the body of his dead father. He is seriously injured, and he is saved by a man named Jan Kopec. Then we get some backound. The narrator is Moishe Goldner, called Moinek by the neighboring Poles. He is 16 or 17, he's not sure which, and it is now 1943, January. He is fairly sure that his entire family is dead, killed at the hands of the Nazis. He had been living in the forest, stealing food, for the past year and a half. He knows who Jan Kopec is; he's the infamous outlaw whispered about even before the war. Kopec brings Moniek to his home, and allows him to recuperate before taking Moniek with him to one of his hiding places. Kopec informs Moniek that he is going to be his accomplice. Because of Moniek's hight (five feet), he can go pull off what Kopec cannot.
The violence that Moniek is brought to is a sad testimony to war; the heroics he is brought to are a glad testimony to man. This is not fiction, and the stories and people herein are not stories and characters that a fiction writer could get away with; they are not particularly glamorous, their objectives are serious. Their politics cannot be fully explained; nor can anything else. There are no definite good guys, but there are plenty of villains. Stillman does not dehumanize Moniek's enemies(Moniek got changed to Morris when he moved to America). The boundries seperating good and bad, boundries that make us comfortable in our lives, disappear in wartime. Includes a bibliography.
Thoughtful reading.
