Comrades, Avenge Us [Paperback]

Stephen G. Esrati (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1995

Based on a true story, a novel follows two officers -- American and Canadian -- who are captured by the German Gestapo while on a mission in Yugoslavia and survive to form a postwar Nazi-hunting operation to avenge their slaughtered comrades.

Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: Esrati Books; 1 edition (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1896329241
• ISBN-13: 978-1896329246
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,574,025 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Fitting Memorial to Nazi Germany's Forgotten Victims, December 18, 2001

By 

J. R. White (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Comrades, Avenge Us (Paperback)

>>Comrades, Avenge Us<< is one of the best books of the espionage/military genre I have read in many years. Author Stephen G. Esrati addresses an intelligent lay readership and uses effective language. The book is enjoyable, readable, and
thought- provoking. I cannot figure out why a major publisher like Random House or Dell has not jumped at the chance to offer him a contract. His book compares favorably with historical novels by Hans Hellmut Kirst, a German veteran of the Second World War who made a career of writing stories about the German Army and the Nazis, in part derived from personal experience. In fact, >>Comrades<< is better than several of Kirst's later books, like >>Brothers in Arms<< and >>Nights of the Long Knives.<<

The story of a failed Office of Strategic Services mission to Yugoslavia and a twenty-year search for justice, >>Comrades<< is a memorial to Anglo-American prisoners of war who were imprisoned in Adolf Hitler's concentration camps. Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Auschwitz each held small numbers of "ex-prisoners of war," often in retaliation for escape attempts. In league with former Yugoslav and Italian resisters, Majors John Bowles and William Macnaughton hunt for German and Croatian war criminals who inflicted unspeakable tortures upon themselves and murdered their OSS Team (URBAN).

The author's personal experience give certain episodes in the novel a gritty realism. Born in Berlin, Esrati emigrated to Palestine with his immediate family right after Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor in 1933. From Palestine, his family emigrated to the United States in 1937, and Esrati served in the US Army just after the war. A one-time member of the Revisionist-Zionist organization, Irgun, which fought for Israeli independence, and a veteran of US Special Forces, his experience with clandestine activities and the idiosyncracies of the US Army during the Eisenhower Era make the story come alive. Since the publication of >>Comrades,<< Esrati has published a second novel which draws upon his personal experiences, >>The Tenth Prayer: A Novel of Israel<< (2000).

An excellent first offering, >>Comrades<< nevertheless contains several flaws. In Major John Bowles, the author succumbed to the temptation to create a larger-than-life protagonist, as is often the case in espionage novels. At times, it is difficult to imagine Bowles, a polymath whose experiences would fill three lifetimes: a dancer in the Andy Hardy movies, a runner in the Boston Marathon, and a member of the Special Forces, all the while leading the life of a Nazi hunter.

Another flaw concerns the fictional representation of Nazi atrocities. If >>Comrades<< commemorates Anglo-American victims of Nazi concentration camps, why then focus upon the OSS, whose members engaged in espionage and sabotage, and therefore had little reason to expect even the (albeit inadequate) protection granted to POWs under the Geneva Convention of 1929? Historical novels often focus upon the exceptional, and Esrati should be given some leeway for artistic license in this case. But OSS captives rarely survived the war; the Germans usually executed them as spies and saboteurs. An important exception was US Navy Commander Jack Taylor, who led a failed OSS mission in Northern Italy and was confined to Mauthausen until US liberation.

Esrati should be commended for discussing in detail the mass murder of American POWs at Malmedy during the "Battle of the Bulge," and for roundly condemning Senator Joseph McCarthy's subsequent misrepresentation of treatment accorded to suspected war criminals in US custody, but he errs in the assertion that there were former American POWs in Dora-Mittelbau. While future Saturn V Program director Arthur Rudolph oversaw V-2 guided missile production at Mittelwerk (central work), and allegedly witnessed in person in November 1944 a mass hanging from a gantry in that cavernous complex, the victims were camp resisters, not US POWs. Setting aside these criticisms, >>Comrades<< makes a fitting memorial to Nazi Germany's forgotten victims.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't put it down, November 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Comrades, Avenge Us (Paperback)

I found this a real page-turner, and I stayed up much too late to finish it. I loaned my copy to a friend who is a World War II vet, and her comment was "more fact than fiction." She went on to say that this was one of the best-informed books about World War II that she had ever read. Mr. Esrati obviously knows his subject very well to earn that kind of praise from someone who was there. He is also able to create believable characters and make the reader really care about them. Buy it!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best "almost real" fiction I have read., June 9, 1999

By 

[e-mail], Kevin Begin (Dayton, Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Comrades, Avenge Us (Paperback)

Stephen Esrati wrote a book that kept my interest from start to finish. I thought I was reading a non-fiction novel until I read the acknowledgements at the end. The story moves quickly starting at the planning stage of a military intelligence operation during WWII and finally focusing on the search for Nazi war criminals. The book has no slow sections, and as such, I was always engrossed with the material. What makes the book read like non-fiction must be the result of Mr. Esrati's dilegent reserch into the people and places that comprise this book.

I highly recommend this book to anyone that loves adventure and the pursuit of justice.