Warsaw Boy is the remarkable true story of a sixteen-year old boy soldier in war-torn Pol&. ” The best-ever account of what is was like to be young & fighting in the Warsaw Rising.” (Neal Ascherson, Sunday Herald, Books of the Year). Poland suffered terribly under the Nazis. By the end of the war six million had been killed: some were innocent civilians
- half of them were Jews
- but the rest died as a result of a ferocious guerrilla war the Poles had waged. On 1 August 1944 Andrew Borowiec, a fifteen-year-old volunteer in the Resistance, lobbed a grenade through the shattered window of a Warsaw apartment block onto some German soldiers running below. `I felt I had come of age. I was a soldier & I`d just tried to kill some of our enemies`. The Warsaw Uprising lasted for 63 days: Himmler described it as `the worst street fighting since Stalingrad`. Yet for the most part the insurgents were poorly equipped local men & teenagers
- some of them were even younger than Andrew. Over that summer Andrew faced danger at every moment, both above & below ground as the Poles took to the city`s sewers to creep beneath the German lines during lulls in the fierce counterattacks. Wounded in a fire fight the day after his sixteenth birthday & unable to face another visit to the sewers, he was captured as he lay in a makeshift cellar hospital wondering whether he was about to be shot or saved. Here he learned a lesson: there were decent Germans as well as bad. From one of the most harrowing episodes of the Second World War, this is an extraordinary tale of survival & defiance recounted by one of the few remaining veterans of Poland`s bravest summer. Andrew Borowiec dedicates this book to all the Warsaw boys, `especially those who never grew up`. ”A subtle, well observered autobiography. Beautifully paced.” (The Times). ”A timely, angry, terribly moving & drily amusing account of an especially dark period in Poland`s often tragic history.” (Telegraph). ” Excellent, hugely engaging. For all the horrors that Borowiec describes, his is an affectionate, wryly amusing account puntuated by episodes of warmth & humanity.” (Financial Times). Andrew Borowiec was born at Lodz in Poland in 1928. At fifteen he joined the Home Army, the main Polish resistance during the Second World War, & fought in the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising. After the war he left Poland & attended Columbia University`s Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Cyprus with his English wife Juliet.