The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of World War II [Paperback]

Leo Litwak (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 25, 2002

This is the true story of Leo Litwak, an award-winning novelist and former World War II combat medic, who in 1943 was a college student thrilled by the prospect of helping to fight what people were calling a good war. It's the story of real people in war-friends and thieves, dreamers and killers, jokers and heroes-as well as the personal account of a young American plucked from a sheltered and comfortable life and sent to a foreign land to save the men fighting to save the world. Few books have portrayed the grit and wonder of war with such eloquence, and still fewer have shown how war looks through the eyes of a soldier whose mission was saving lives, not taking them.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Leo Litwak's lightly fictionalized memoir of combat puts the lie to the current sentimentalization of the "Greatest Generation." Litwak's WWII was, like all wars, an exercise in mass homicide, presided over by a mostly unseen officer class and carried out by young men trained to erase the boundary between violence and its sublimation a boundary that is, at other times, the very foundation of civilization. The fictional Litwak, the son of a disaffected Jewish union organizer in Michigan, is drafted into the army in 1943. His upbringing naturally leads to clashes with his fellow recruits in the South Carolina camp where he receives training to become a medic. But by late fall, 1944, when his company is shipped to Europe, Litwak has made a few good friends. He idolizes Sergeant Lucca, who literally dies on top of Leo, eviscerated by a rocket fragment. A fellow soldier, Maurice Sully, views the war as an extension of his motto, "I go to the border, say `Fuck you' to no-trespassing signs." He loots, connives, entertains and ends up being drafted into an army musical produced by Special Services. Another soldier, Roy Jones, a Louisiana boy, kills German prisoners to exact personal vengeance. Roy's opponent in the platoon is Frank Jones, an older man who served on the left side in the Spanish Civil War. The platoon fights through Belgium and into Germany, and ends up in Grossdorf, a village in territory ceded to East Germany after the war, where they wait for the Red Army's arrival. Litwak's tough-minded narrative portrays war's peculiar customs with compelling honesty and wry humor. Agent, Ellen Levine. Author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Litwak, who served as a medic in World War II, is a novelist, and he currently teaches English literature at San Francisco State University. He is a Jew who personally witnessed the results of Nazi brutality toward Jews, yet he is also a man whose basic decency and sensitivity to the human condition will not allow him to succumb to hatred. In this dramatized version of his wartime service in Europe, Litwak has altered the names of some people and places, and some of the events described are actually composites of several experiences. Nevertheless, this brutal and yet frequently uplifting saga of war has the ring of authenticity. There are no "good guys" or "bad guys" here, although the presence of both good and evil is constant. Instead, we witness ordinary men, most of them quite young, striving to survive a conflict that few of them understand. This is a disturbing, revealing, and very important glimpse of warfare at the most elementary level. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (June 25, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0142002194
• ISBN-13: 978-0142002193
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,101,802 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars contemplative, unsentimental memoir of Jewish WWII medic, January 3, 2002

By 

Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of World War II (Hardcover)

Nearly half a century after he had served as a medic in the United States Army during World War II, Leo Litwak's "The Medic" attempts to place a sense of understanding and finality to his experiences tending the wounded and struggling for his own survival during the final days of that war. Direct, hard-hitting and uncompromising in its sober portrait of American men at war, "The Medic" should serve as a capable antidote to a false romanticization of our GI Joes who fought against Nazi atrocities. Ironically, the liberating American Army of Leo Litwak realistically is composed of amoral, conniving and bigoted soldiers who know how to fight and also how to enrich themselves from the people they supposedly are liberating and conquering.

Litwak's anticipation of fighting the Nazis, after all, was tinctured by the Holocaust; he deeply sensed the enormity of the scale of the destruction of European Jewry. His decent and left-leaning immigrant parents escaped history, and Leo's collegiate career proved apparent vindication of the open nature of American society. The collegiate Litwak appreciated philosophy and complexity; the seasoned veteran Litwak learned that simplicity is illusory. By war's end, Litwak "wanted to strip away any evidence of war...I wanted everything to be simple."

Perhaps the single most memorable character of Litwak's experience is the amoral Maurice, a talented, venal and brutal man, whose voracious appetite for violence, riches and women know no limits. Maurice's violence cuts a wide swath; as a victor, he genuinely believes in his own omnipotence. Quietly moral and bound to the medic's code of bearing no arms and tending to all (including the enemy) who may be injured, Litwak feels both a deep sense of repugnance and begrudged admiration at Maurice's example.

Almost immediately, Litwak develops a callousness towards death and an impersonal outlook on the afflicted as a survival technique. Despite a feigned imperviousness to disappointment, he encounters American soldiers so racist, so perverse as to warrant his silent reprobation. One such soldier is Roy, a cold-hearted killer whose blood thirst and drive for retribution to the Germans is so deep that even Litwak is repelled by him. A Southern farmer by occupation, Roy sense's Litwak's ambivalence. After Litwak balks at Roy's desire to inflict immediate revenge, Roy criticizes Leo's reticence: "You, Doc, a Jew, are too softhearted to operate in this world. You need coldhearted sons of bitches like me to keep things straight in this world."

A different sort of soldier, however, is Frank. Openly egalitarian and brazenly proud of his leftist politics, Frank challenges the Americans to live up to their professed war aims. He constantly reproaches Leo for failing to take stands for his beliefs. Litwak comments, "Frank was mistaken if he imagined most GIs were out to change the world...They wanted to the world to stay put...GIs wanted their service to pay off with gorgeous women, good jobs, more money, secure families, with nothing else changed."

Litwak knows that the world has changed. The sheer scope of the conflict, the unspeakable horrors engendered by the Holocaust and the necessary moral refocusing each soldier enacted in order to survive made the prewar world obsolete. "The Medic" reminds the contemporary reader that the so-called "greatest generation" paid far more than we may realize in defeating its enemies.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Controlled detachment, May 20, 2001

By 

Richard Hanlin (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of World War II (Hardcover)

The theme of this book and it source of tension is the conflict between (in combat) our need to survive and our need and ability to feel. There is no resolution nor should there be and this is the truth and reward of this book

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars the medic: life and death in the last days of WWII, October 22, 2003

By 

Christoph Kelly (Auburn, WA.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of World War II (Hardcover)

I was disappointed in this book. Maybe I went into it with too high an expectation. I knew going in, it was a dramatized version of Mr. Litwak's experiences but I expected more insight into his job as a medic. there were relatively few scenes of his actually work. In that way, I would say the title is misleading. It really is a book of one man's army service in Europe during the later days of World War II. He seems to have disliked everyone he served with and Mr. Litwak has the right to be. there were more sex stories than medic stories. the Sgt. Lucca story I thought would help me gain more insight into the author. But it left me looking for more of an explanation of how Mr. Litwak really felt. Did he like the Sgt. or not? He seems to have been hurt by his death but I am not sure.
Thebook overall does help one experience WWII from a more realistic standpoint. But a non-fiction approach would have been more of a contribution.