The March

by W.S. Kuniczak

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385002041
• ISBN13: 9780385002042
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 824 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Epic novel by a Polish Solzhenitsyn

This is the second novel of the W.S. Kuniczak trilogy that begins with "The Thousand-Hour Day" and ends with "The Valedictory." Together, these books sum up the Polish experience in World War II. "The March" follows some characters who, in the first book, escaped the Nazi onslaught of September 1939. They fall into the hands of the Soviets who invaded Poland from the east; they are shipped to Stalin's Siberian prison camps in scenes that recall Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago." Polish army officers are massacred at Katyn Forest and on ships deliberately sunk in Arctic seas. Some characters escape the Gulag and, in the march that gives the novel its title, trek across tundra and taiga to Central Asia, only to find that Stalin, now that Hitler has invaded the USSR. wants the imprisoned Poles to bury their grievances along with their dead and fight for him. Kuniczak is a great descriptive writer. He has quirks, including a relentlessly Poland-centric view of the world and questionable attitudes toward Jews. He is permanently angry at the Western powers for selling Poland out in 1939 and again at Yalta in 1945. This isn't a fun read, except for the felicity of his technique. It's long and grueling and unsentimental, like the experience it describes. Reading it, you will be shaken.