"This First Rate Memoir" comes from Publishers Weekly, the American book trade magazine reviewing the new Presidio book My Just War by Gabriel Temkin. Temkin is one of the only known Polish Jews to have fought as a combat soldier in the Red Army. After fleeing the Germans, in May 1943, Temkin joined the scout/reconnaissance platoon of a rifle regiment, and fought the Nazis across Ukraine, Romania, and Hungary, reaching Austria by the war's end in April 1945. He was awarded the Medal of Valor and and distinguished himself in battle on several other occasions. My Just War is truly a remarkable story of the resilience, courage, and perseverance of a stranger in a strange land. Temkin says in his Introduction: 'I have been carrying these memoirs within myself for a very long time. Why have I finally made up my mind to write them down? Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish Nobel Laureate in Literature, says in one of her wonderful poems: "The joy of writing. The power of preserving. The revenge of a mortal hand." No one could have better explained why people write memoirs. I am not so conceited to think that I have written "for posterity". Historians have already thousands of books and memoirs, in addition to archive documents, available for writing their books on World War II and the Holocaust. But indifference toward stories about World War II and the Holocaust will probably grow as soon as the last survivors are gone. All memoirs notwithstanding, the Nazi crimes in World War II and the Holocaust will gradually fade away in historical memory and will perhaps appear no more important than the Spanish Inquisition is considered today. In one of my daytime nightmares, Hitler had won the war and the Nazis imposed their new order on the totally Judenrein world. A few generations later, heil-Hitlering Germany was de-Hitlerized and ordinary Germans, guided by noble feelings, apologized for what their ancestors had done to the Jews. This cleared the ground for historians to undertake impartial and objective - as becoming of true scientists - comparative studies: "The Inquisition and the Holocaust". In short, these memoirs have not been written because, fearing that people would forget, I had presumptuously assumed that I could somehow prevent this from happening. I wrote mainly because it was I who could not forget.' Greenhill recently published Soviet Casualities and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century which presents complete casualty statistics for the Soviet forces throughout World War II. This memoir reveals a very human perspective of the struggle from the point of view of an ordinary soldier in the Red Army. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 82 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com