Partisans and Patriots

Description

PARTISANS AND PATRIOTSThey refuse to bow to tyranny when their homelands fall to Adolf Hitler’s Fascism. They fight back with no thought for themselves, with no weapons stronger than their daring and their courage.Werner Brandt, a rebel against Nazism, is sent to a reformatory for insubordination, then conscripted into the German army. He deserts in Poland and joins the Polish Resistance. He leads a group of partisans and fights alongside the legendary Major Hubal in southern Poland.Bram Edelstein’s Jewish family seek safety in Paris. When the Germans overrun France, Bram joins the French Resistance and engages in daring acts of sabotage. His sister Rona flees to Poland and risks her life in helping rescue children from the Warsaw ghetto.When her mother is arrested as a spy, Ania Olenski escapes to her uncle’s home on the border of Ukraine and fights with Russian partisans against Germans retreating from the Eastern Front.Erich and Roksana Brandt smuggle a young Jew out of Warsaw. Sentenced to separate concentration camps, they endure the brutal barbarity of the death camps of Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Auschwitz.With no help from the Allies, the heroes of this novel and the downtrodden but intrepid people of Poland converge on devastated Warsaw and face with defiance the overwhelming might of the German army.”When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death—that is heroism.” So quoted the American orator Robert Green Ingersoll. Partisans and Patriots celebrates that will, that duty, and that honor.

About Ron Duffy

Born and raised in Northern Ireland, Ron Duffy spent three years “on the road”, mostly by bicycle, travelling extensively in both western and eastern Europe, with “working sojourns” in Norway, Austria and England. HisMy adventuring over, he settled down to studies, and obtained a BA in Geography from the Queen’s University of Belfast. He then emigrated to Canada, took an MSc in Biogeography at the University of Calgary and studied for his PhD at McGill University in Montreal. In Montreal he started a long career as a university lecturer in geography.Duffy’s writing career began when he started publishing mostly travel and history articles in numerous Irish, British and Canadian newspapers and magazines. In 1988 McGill-Queen’s University Press published his non-fiction book, The Road to Nunavut: The Progress of the Eastern Arctic Inuit since the Second World War which was based on his PhD thesis. In 1988 his play, Hearts and Minds, won first prize in the novice section of the annual Alberta Playwriting Competition. Another play, Loved and Left, was given a staged reading by Theatre 80 in Calgary.Retired from lecturing, Duffy turned to writing full-time. In the Whistler Independent Book Awards competition in 2012 his novel Crossed Lives was a nominee, and his historical novel O’Hanlon received an Honourable Mention. He has also written a trilogy of Irish novels, The Unquiet Land, In Turbulent Times, and A Further Shore, since published independently in one volume, and a World War Two novel Brandt. As a companion volume to the Ulster trilogy he wrote Until The Troubles Started: A Brief Political History of Northern Ireland.