Larry Stillman

Excerpt:

It was about 3 a.m. when we set out, the master and his willing apprentice. We followed a route that paralleled the road heading east from Jaslo. Several hours remained until sunrise, but we had a lot of ground to cover in order to intercept the train before it began filling with its human cargo.

We moved quickly and silently in the dark. Kopec led the way. I clutched the camera case tightly by my side. It had been loaded with film earlier in the evening--either by Kopec or by one of his unseen co-conspirators--and that camera, along with my ever-present Luger, did not leave my side.

After a time we came upon railroad tracks and followed them for a short distance. Twenty minutes later, we saw what we had come for: a locomotive and at least twenty-four boxcars, standing silent and empty, portentously awaiting their fragile payload. Part of the train was dimly illuminated by the flickering light of a small fire on the track, built to keep the switch from freezing.

The train stood on a siding just outside Moderowka station, named for the small, nearby village situated between Jaslo and Krosno. I understood I would be on the train for a day or two, depending on its destination. Then, if the train did indeed turn around as anticipated, and if I survived, it would take the same time to return.

Well, I would not be on the train, exactly.
I would be under it. The plan was as daring as it was dangerous...


RAVES & REVIEWS:

"’I can remember crawling out from beneath my father's lifeless body.’ From the first line, this Holocaust memoir grips you with its searing action. At the same time, it raises crucial moral issues. In 1943, in southern Poland, Morris Goldner, 16, was rescued by Jan Kopec, a notorious criminal who trained the small, quiet Jewish kid as a ruthless accomplice in armed robberies and sold the boy's services to the partisans. Now Goldner lives in Chicago, haunted forever by what he saw and what he did. Stillman allows the survivor to tell his story in a riveting first-person narrative. On the one hand, it reads like a fast-paced Bonnie-and-Clyde outlaw adventure. But there's absolutely no romanticism either about the Holocaust horror the boy witnesses (including the roundup and massacre of his own family) or about his own role as robber, saboteur, and killer. The outlaw brutalizes the boy; did the boy humanize Kopec? When is killing justified? Discussion groups will want this one.”
“Rarely has the old saw about war making strange bedfellows been more appropriate than in this story of a small 16-year-old Jewish boy and one of rural Poland’s most notorious criminals, Jan Kopec.
Stillman has found a very different kind of Holocaust story, full of drama and adventure. When Hitler’s army invaded Poland in 1939, Goldner and his rural Jewish family were spared from immediate roundup. But by 1943, he had witnessed his mother and sister being headed onto a train and had been left for dead beneath his father’s body, both of them shot and bayoneted by a collaborator who had been one of his father’s friends. After Kopec, Goldner’s unlikely rescuer, nursed him back to health, the pair began an 18-month partnership in which Kopec received money from partisans for having Goldner carry out acts of sabotage against the Nazis. His small size, courage and ability to learn--Kopec trained his young charge in marksmanship, a renegade German soldier taught him fluent German, and a Gypsy trained him in hand-to-hand combat--resulted in impressive victories for area partisans. Goldner blew up trains and bridges used by the Nazi army and photographed Jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Stillman has done a remarkable job tracking down what little documentation exists in order to corroborate Goldner’s unique story, making a trip to the region, meeting with former neighbors and with the children and grandchildren of Jan Kopec.”
“Morris Goldner was often lucky in his friendships. And in Larry Stillman, Goldner has found a perfect Boswell. Stillman’s impeccable sense of narrative turns Goldner’s amazing story into a breathtaking and heartbreaking drama of deep moral complexity.”
“One of the most thrilling reads I’ve come upon in years. It’s simply written, even when dealing with such complex issues as the political underground in wartime Poland, and such difficult subjects as the ethics of war...It has the narrative propulsion of a best selling novel. Scenes are dramatic and action oriented, the narrator himself comes alive and changes before the reader, and minor characters leap into existence...Adults and teenagers alike will go for it. It’s a winner.”
"Unlike many 'mediated' memoirs, Stillman does not turn this important story into a simple tale of heroism and courage, although there are elements of both. Stillman's telling of Goldner's story explores the moral complexities of survival as well as the ambiguity of this strange wartime relationship."
"An exceptional memoir of the Holocaust: it chronicles the personal and symbiotic relationship between a Christian and a Jew in an era of unfathomable hatred."

--Foreword