Customer Reviews

Comrades, Avenge Us

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

>>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.

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!

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.

Though sometimes difficult to read, the graphic descriptions of the cruelties inflicted on prisoners of war remind us that men can be very 'creative' when it comes to torture. Comrades, Avenge Us addresses crimes committed during WWII. Many perpetrators of those crimes were not punished in a timely fashion, if at all. Given the attrocities coming to light regarding more recent wartime behaviors, this book suggests a strong incentive to eliminate any time limits we might consider for prosecuting war criminals.

An up-all-night-reading sort of book! Esrati gives much more depth and detail than many popular war fiction writers, which added a great deal to my enjoyment of the book. If you're remotely interested in war fiction (which you probably are if you're reading this) buy a copy. It's simply a great book.

Comrades Avenge Us is one of those books that is just too compelling to stop reading. It is based on real events and is sometimes prone to fairly long presentations of background material--which I see one of the earlier reviewers found very boring. Nonetheless it is a riviting story and I found myself staying up late and then returning to it as soon as I got up. I finished the book in short order, puting everything I could aside until it was done. Anyone who wants to read an exciting story that also exposes the rapid transformation in American policy from hunting Nazi war criminals to employing and protecting them will find exactly what they are looking for in this book.

Steve Esrati is a man who boils easily when he perceives injustice, often to some effect, and always eloquently. For some years he has been boiling at the injustice dealt to Nazi war criminals: Too many of them were allowed to live. Some of the possibly culpable were smuggled without a trial into the United States by those who wanted them to work on U.S. rocketry. After a few trials at Nuremberg that resulted in the peaceful deaths of a few big-wigs, unlike the starvation and tortured deaths thay had inflicted on others for years, justice died down. Less well known but just as vicious criminals were either slapped on the wrist or, what's worse, given a show trial in which at least one American judge was led into error by his ideas of American justice applied injudiciously. That was the Mautthausen trial where American soldiers who had been tortured were not allowed to give evidence against the top hands at the torture chamber because only the underlings did the actual work on them. What Esrati did to ease his boiling was to write a novel interleaving actual Nazi bloodletters with fictional soldiers, American and Canadian, who were members of a failed O.S.S. raid into Yugoslavia near the end of the war. The victims are fictional but the torturers are real; including an American and a Canadian who are beaten on the genitals on the orders of a sadistic SS general: "Make women out of these pigs." The novel treats of the prisoners' striving after the war to bring their torturers to justice. It gets to be pretty exciting from time to time, particularly after the American major resigns his commission because he sees in America's intervention on Vietnam a situation much like the convolutions described at the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis. Esrati has been in the U.S. Army, although he saw no combat in World War II, and he writes well, as exemplified by his description of the rapid trot halfway between marching and a run assumed only by adjutants on parade.

I want to give a comment on Esrati's book as a German reader, who was two years old when WWII ended. I started to read the book with some distance and kind of reluctantly. Didn't know what I was confronted with. But after some pages I was immersed in the story and even some language problems didn't prevent me from reading on every possible minute I could spare. A brillinatly written story - fiction combined with the real events in a way that the reader has to become concerned about how the international community should handle crimes against mankind. Esrati's book was not finished for me when I read the last page, it's a story for a reflection after having read it. And it leaves the question: Is mankind able to learn from history or is she condemned to repeat it? Roland Klinger

Mans inhumanity to man... not unlike those events that are scattered throughout the world today are revealed. Events occuring shortly after WWII and how an O.S.S. team is treated after capture by the Germans. But the most riveting comment that really strikes a cord..."In the third cell, German whitewash had tried to conceal "Comardes, avenge us", but the letters are still visible." This is very apropos...I liked it and would recommend reading it...the dialog is believable a good read.

I read Stephan's Book in record time. Kudos to Mr. Esrati for a "great" read.It was one of those "rare books" that one wants to slowdown when one nears the end. Well all readers of this genre know why. There are few authors who can carry the reader and accurate history in their narrative. Stephan's technique of having his characters narrate "mini-history lessons" on such a complex topic was a "sui-generis" stylistic accomplishment.