I have long wanted to read this, and am glad to see this as a prompt to finally buy the book. Thanks for posting this great article. My grandfather was a teen

I have long wanted to read this, and am glad to see this as a prompt to finally buy the book. Thanks for posting this great article. My grandfather was a teen during the war, spending most of it under the occupation as a cow herder in Grodno, a small-ish city that is now on the westmost edge of Belarus. For him, war rolled over really quick one way over that town and then rolled over the other way, and in the middle was lots of hunger and keeping your head down. I took my girlfriend to visit with them back in early oughts and we were walking around through the Grodno old town and she was asking about a certain part of town that seemed to her to be in a really poor upkeep and he answered - well this is where the ghetto was situated, near synagogue, and nobody really wanted to do much with that part of town after all the jews were "liquidated" in 43. I am sad to say that even though I spent every summer in that town, I never really noticed until then. She told me it was really the first time the war became truly real to her. For me it was when I was little, I remember working in the garage with my family and this one older guy, we were painting something, and it was hot, so he took off his shirt. Underneath, he was completely covered by this elaborate criss-cross pattern of scars all over his body. I asked him what it was and he said he was in infantry retreating in summer of 1941 and their battalion was taking shelter in a burned out village where only the central stoves of the houses were left (wood outside, brick inside) and people were hiding behind the stoves and the tanks opened up with heavy machine guns, exploding the bricks and cutting people up with the sharp clay pieces. He said he was one of just few survivors because he hid inside one of the stoves, everyone else got cut to pieces on the outside.