The Forest Republic

In 1944 the Red Army drove the Germans out of Poland, and a second occupation began. Over the next nine years tens of thousands of Polish soldiers refused to lay down their arms. These were veterans of the Home Army and the nationalist underground, young men and women who had grown up in the conspiracy. Against them stood the full machinery of Soviet power and the communist state it installed. Abandoned at Yalta, deceived at Pruszków and betrayed by the amnesty of 1947, they fought on in forests, bunkers and mountain valleys. They fought on in the interrogation cells of Rakowiecka Street.

This sweeping narrative history follows the second underground from Operation Tempest to the death of the last partisan in 1963. Witold Pilecki, the volunteer of Auschwitz, appears beside seventeen-year-old Inka, beside Łukasz Ciepliński writing to his son on tissue paper, and beside the highland commander Ogień. It also confronts what the legend leaves out: the burned Belarusian villages of Podlasie and the Jewish survivors murdered on the road at Krościenko.

The story ends at Łączka, where the bones of the executed were found beneath a rubbish dump sixty years on. It refuses both the communist verdict and the hagiography, and tells the story whole.