Mila 18

Gary

Rating: really liked it
Mila 18 is a breathtaking account of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, by the Jewish population of Warsaw, against the plans of the Nazi regime to exterminate them.
It is a great epic from the pen of one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, Leon Uris.
The Warsaw ghetto uprisings are an important symbol of the freedom and dignity of mankind and the ongoing struggle against totalitarianism and cruelty (particular that type of cruelty that is self righteously practiced by ideologues from the left and right.).
The key characters are:
Andrei Androfski , the indomitable hero of a prestigious Polish cavalry regiment , and also a proud Jew.
Gabriella Rak , Andrei's pretty Polish sweetheart , one of the rare voices of conscience in a world gone mad .
Deborah Bronski , the intriguing beauty , a figure of love and tragedy , Andrei's sister.
Paul Bronski , a shell of his man who ,lacks all conviction , driven by the willingness to please his masters and a strong desire to divorce himself from his roots.
Christopher De Monti , The Italian journalist and playboy who will come out of this as the voice that will bring a disturbing hidden truth to the world.
Rachael Bronski : Deborah's lovely and talented daughter , whose life is thrown into turmoil by the Nazi occupation , she is a rare survivor.
Alexander Brandel : a narrator and leader of the Bathyran Zionist Movement in Warsaw
Wolf Brandel : Rachael ` sweetheart and a natural leader ,together with Rachael and her younger brother Stephan ., one of the young people of the ghetto determined to survive .
This book can be appreciated on many levels. It is a novel of love and hate , of destruction and redemption , of much that is tragic and horrific as well triumph of the human spirit . It is an intense human drama.
But most of all it contains an important lesson for the past and present , a lesson more important today than ever.
Fundamentally this is a story of the Jewish people, and about the hatred the Jewish people have survived at a time when the dark and hideous forces of anti-Semitism are reemerging on a scale unknown since Hitler's Third Reich, under the guise of anti-Zionism or hatred of Israel.
This is a story about how the Jewish people where persecuted and massacred at will in every land in which they where strangers, because they did where deprived of a homeland of their own .
Always at the darkest hours of the holocaust the one redeeming factor is the desire for the rebirth of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.
Indeed the movement that keeps the Jewish people alive is Zionism!
The same dream that many evil forces today are working to destroy.
When the Jewish children are being taken to their deaths in the Nazi vehicles, what keeps them alive a little longer is the dream living in the tiny land of Israel, then known by the colonial name of Palestine.
It is this dream that provides the only hope at all when we read of a rachitic three year old girl in filthy rags being shot dead by a Nazi officer, as she desperately ties to retrieve her torn baby doll from under his boot.
Another lesson of the book is the gross indifference to the world of the genocide of Jews. Is this really any different +to the equanimity of the world to the mass killing of Jews today by Palestinian terrorists in Israel , on an almost daily basis ? In a sense there is an even greater perversion by the world today, as most of the world, often led by those considered the most `progressive, shrilly condemn Israel and Jews for defending themselves. Condemn the Jewish people for wanting to survive, for the chance of succeeding where the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto failed.
Take these lines:
`Jews where charred into unrecognizable smoldering corpses.
Jews where roasted in bunkers, which where turned into coffins by wind shifts and downdrafts.
Jews where choked to death in clouds of smoke which crushed their lungs.'
Is this any different to what is going on today every day in Israel, with the bombing of Jews by Arabs .
The German officer Horst Von Epp , warns the Nazi's of the consequences of their holocaust , the disaster that will be brought upon them , and about the mark of shame that will stain their memory.
The same warning must be made to those who are acting against Israel and the Jews today

Arlette

Rating: really liked it
I grew up during World War 11 and although it was kept pretty quite by the Nazis many of us heard about what was happening to the Jewish people in Europe. I read this book when it first came out back in 1961, and I decided to read it again just this past month. This is a really powerful novel, not for the faint hearted. What was so amazing is what these poor Jewish people suffer through. I could hardly put this book down once I started reading it again. I give it five stars. Leon Uris the author also wrote Exodus (movie also with Paul Newman) I plan to re-read Exodus again since it's been over 30 years since I last read it.

Rob

Rating: really liked it
Historical fiction by Leon Uris first published 1961 this audio recording released 2009.

This is the retelling of the horror that was the Warsaw Ghetto and more pacifically the uprising by the Jews who were held prisoner within the ghetto.
The bravery, determination and the willingness to self sacrifice for the greater cause shown by the oppressed Jewish people is nothing short of inspirational.

For a people whose very existence is steeped in forbearance this uprising was unprecedented.

The excesses that the Jews were subjected to was the catalyst that galvanised the many factions within the Jewish community to come together to fight for a common cause. Up to this point there was not a lot of harmony between the various Jewish factions. There were the Orthodox, the Zionists, the Secular and many more in between. But this aggressive act of persecution by the German forces brought all those faction together to bring about what was a herculean, but in the end, a doomed effort. This uprising was as much about proving to the Jews themselves as well as the Germans that they, the Jews of Poland, were not sub-human but were a force to be reckoned with. And prove it they did. For the best part of forty days and night David gave Goliath a fight that would go down in, not just, Jewish history but world history.

Leon Uris takes this appalling period in human history and puts faces to the many people who sacrificed and endured so much.

This is a very graphic depiction of mans inhumanity to man.

In the end I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between the plight of the Jews then and the plight of the Palestinians now.

When, I wonder, will enough ever be enough?

5 stars for an incredible experience.

Quo

Rating: really liked it
My initial reading of Mila 18 by Leon Uris occurred shortly after the novel was published & in fact it may have been one of the first contemporary books I purchased. Tucked into my book was a newspaper review & a listing of best-selling fiction books, with Mila 18 at #3 just behind works by Irving Stone & John Steinbeck. After finishing the Uris novel I was discomforted to read a comment that the author's main reason for being was that Uris managed to create fiction easily translated into blockbuster films, with Exodus & Battle Cry already among them.

When someone in a book club discussion group I am a part of chose the novel, I wondered how the passage of 50 years might alter my interpretation of a book I seemed to take to heart much earlier in life. In rereading Mila 18, I found it to be a seemingly well-researched, well-written work of historical fiction. The novel does not represent a great literary effort but Leon Uris catches my fancy as a better than average story teller, not bad for someone who never graduated from high school because he consistently failed his English class.



Lately, there has been no end of so-called "holocaust novels" but Mila 18 appeared when this was not the case & interestingly, at a time when Wm. L. Shirer's Rise & Fall of the Third Reich, a very large tome I somehow also managed to read, was listed as the #1 best-seller for non-fiction. It was said at one point that Shirer's book "read like a murder mystery, which in many ways it was" but at that point the reality of WWII & the holocaust seemed well beyond my reach, except perhaps when rendered into films.

What caught my attention at 2nd reading was that Leon Uris seemed to capture what I now think of as the complexity of sentiments of the various Polish Jews who were rendered rather quickly from citizens of Poland to ghettoized pariahs with no legal status & finally to human beings consigned to charnel houses in Poland & elsewhere by the Nazis, their willing Polish collaborators, as well as others from the Ukraine & elsewhere.

The wonder that such atrocious behavior was possible was not easily accepted by me then any more than it is today but this fictional account did introduce me to the concept of the holocaust. Further reading of books by Eli Weisel, Viktor Frankl & others, meeting survivors of Nazi concentration camps + visits to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. & Yad Vashem in Jerusalem have served as a further resource, while never yielding concrete answers. Perhaps there are none. But beyond that, the question also remains as to whether any fictional account can do justice to the reality of places like Treblinka, Auschwitz, Buchenwald & the many other endpoints of the Final Solution for Jews & others who were thought to be enemies of the Nazis.

Mila 18 portrays the desperation of Poles with the Russians on their eastern flank and Nazi Germany to the west, with the Poles not able to defend against either. Ultimately, Germany invades by air & overland quickly pulverizing any Polish resistance, including that manifested by 30,000 Jews who served in the Polish army. The novel details the inner struggle of the Polish Jews who occupy the Warsaw Ghetto & demonstrate a wide variety of views on their plight, including some who feel that resistance is most un-Jewish, hoping that their fate will ultimately improve.

A rabbi intones, "Our best defense is to be good Jews". As news of death-camps filters into the ghetto, those who have not already been sent off to what they initially believed to be less ominous relocations for labor required by the Nazi war effort, those remaining cluster together & begin a concerted resistance, sensing the ultimate futility of such a path but also realizing there are no other alternatives. As one explains:

All were imprisoned within the ghetto in a loosely knit association of diversified ideologies & each beats his breast & berates the other. I don't care if your beliefs take you along a path of Orthodox religion or Zionist ideology or a path of labor activism. We are all here because our paths travel a blind course through a thick forest, seemingly devoid of human dignity. Beyond the forest, all of our paths merge into a single great highway which ends in the barren hills of Judea.

This is our singular goal. How we travel through the forest is for each man's conscience. Where we end our journey is always the same. We all seek the same thing through different ways--an end to the long night of 2,000 years of darkness & unspeakable abuses which will continue to plague us until the star of David flies over Zion.

All of Warsaw has become a coffin for the ghettoized Jews.



While I am not interested in singling out all of the main characters of the Uris novel, the author details competing alliances, some generational divisions & also several love stories, perhaps to retain the interest of those readers with a less historical bent. With limited resources & few weapons, the remaining Jews exact a rather heavy toll on the German soldiers who are quite unprepared for Jewish resistance of any kind. When the insurrection begins, many within the ghetto are glad to be Jews for the 1st time in their lives.

The various bunkers that are linked together in the ghetto are named after concentration camps and there is a memorable celebration of Passover as their reinforced enemy gathers outside for the final assault. As word of the prolonged resistance within Warsaw's Jewish ghetto seeps out to the rest of Europe, the "dubious battle" (a phrase Uris uses several times) becomes a source of pride & even inspiration.

There are indeed formulaic elements to Mila 18 but Leon Uris manages to give dimension to the many characters, some of whom do manage to escape & survive via a tunnel, even as the ghetto is torched & obliterated at novel's end. And the story of the insurrection has sufficient complexity to hold one's interest, even at a 2nd reading of the novel, one that I think serves as a vehicle for understanding at least one chapter of WWII & the Holocaust.

Lewis Weinstein

Rating: really liked it
I recently re-read Mila 18 while in Warsaw; of course, I went to Mila 18 and stood on the actual spot. I had first read the book when it came out in 1962. It was powerful then, even more so today. The most moving lines ... "For the first time I am proud of being a Jew" ... "you must survive and be part of the State of Israel" ... resonated with me as a Jew and as an author who has written about Jews. My grandparents lived near Warsaw; they left in the early 1900s; their families stayed and were murdered by the Germans. Despite what I view as sincere efforts on the part of contemporary Germans, and thier collaborators in other countries, to recognize and atone for the horrendous deed of their ancestors, it is hard for me to forgive. I doubt I ever will.

Tim

Rating: really liked it
This began like one of those 1980s epic TV series when the subject matter is fascinating but the script and acting awful. The author gets carried away with every character's back story and he shows us in superfluous and often syrupy detail scenes that could have been told in a sentence or two. However once he had settled into his grove and the war narrative began it was a compelling read. He gives us the Warsaw Ghetto from the perspective of both the Jews and the Nazis with the odd Pole thrown in too, culminating in the heroic uprising. Leon Uris isn't the best writer in the world but he did a brilliant job of comprehensively researching his subject and the story is gripping.

Tamar...playing hooky for a few hours today

Rating: really liked it
Leon Uris was an amazing author. His books do not exactly fit into my favorite reading genres, but they transcend. I binged on a few of his works in 1970 and loved them

indiefishsteak

Rating: really liked it
It has been a very long time since I read this book. It had a profound effect on me, and for that I have marked it as amazing. Though I'm not certain how fond I would be of it now, I think that it made me search my soul for certain answers about humanity, its strengths and weaknesses. In short it is about war, genocide, the human spirit, and taking a stand even when you know the action is futile. Though, as I've recently read in another book, wouldn't it be far less meaningful if we knew that we would prevail in our efforts against death in its finality?

Lianda Ludwig

Rating: really liked it
Leon Uris books are written in a style that takes history and historical characters and fictionalizes events through these made-up composite characters in a very entertaining, personalized and informative manner. Not great literature, however, his books are all page-turners and can be very emotional wrenching. This book, about the history of the Nazis taking over Poland, and the brave fight in the Warsaw Ghetto has left a deep imprint on my soul. Reader beware - if sad books stay with you, this will leave a deep wound.

Ann

Rating: really liked it
Ok. Ok. Deep breaths. I'm going to try really, really hard to not get overly worked up here. It's entirely possible, that if you know nothing about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, if you have never read any literary version of the Holocaust (SOPHIE'S CHOICE AHEM COUGH COUGH), and/or if you had forgotten about the many and varied injustices of World War II, this book will present itself as new, exciting, and maybe even revelatory to you. I don't have any personal foothold on these events, but (big disclaimer here) I did live in Poland for a while -- one of those places where things that happened in 1939 are felt to have happened yesterday; where Holocaust survivors routinely visit elementary schools; where the carriage drivers in Old Town can give you their personal narratives of where and how the bombs fell -- so an Amazing Story of Personal Courage in the Face of Adversity - Based on True Events! isn't quite enough to bring me to my feet.

So, there's that. But also? This book is propagandist dreck. To be fair, pro-Zionist and anti-Nazi propaganda isn't the worst thing in the world, but -- and this is just my personal preference -- I do not generally favor books where prose, character development, and emotional nuance are manipulated to support a thesis. Mila 18 is half bodice-ripper, half pamphlet, with only the worst qualities of each. I am so unimpressed that the Uprising captured Uris' imagination if the best he could do to was to show it through the eyes of boring, one-dimensional stock characters ("Angry Zionist", "Pacifist Zionist", "Wife") and prose so soul-crushingly awful I was turning down pages JUST SO I COULD TELL GOODREADS ABOUT SOME OF THESE SENTENCES. Witness: "Rachel and Wolf lay side by side on the bed, awed by the magnificence of their experience...She felt so elated from the wonderment of fulfillment."

That the preceding combination of words appeared in one of the only popular novels about these absolutely extraordinary true events makes me want to cry.

You guys, this is the closest I have ever come to not finishing a book -- the only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that something this conventional would be building to some sort of barnstorming and possibly redemptive climax. It's not. Please, don't be like me. Stay far, far away.

Jayne Bowers

Rating: really liked it
A work of historical fiction, this novel is both informative and mind boggling. I learned a wealth of information about the situation of Jews in and around Warsaw before and during WW II and was reminded to "never forget." I used the term mind boggling because enjoyable is too light of an adjective to describe such horror juxtaposed to kindness, love to hate, and good to evil.

One of the many things I enjoy about Uris's books is the way he describes and develops his characters and the various situations in which they're involved. He introduces the reader to Gabriela, Andre, Paul Bronski, Deborah, Chris deMonti, and several others in the beginning of the novel, and then as the book progresses you see even more of their many dimensions. For example, you might think that Gabby is a social butterfly, spoiled and pampered. You'd be wrong. She's a strong person, a loyal one too, especially to Andre but to the others as well. And then there's Koenig, a mean and malevolent person.

Members of my writing group are fond of saying, "Show, don't tell," and Uris is a master of showing. No one can read Mila 18 without seeing, hearing, and smelling the sights, sounds, and odors of the battlefield, the underground ghetto, and the sewer. I saw the children eating chocolate on their way to a concentration camp, felt revolted by Stutze's brutal murder of Max Kleperman, and smelled and "tasted" the murky sewer gas swirling around up to my neck.

Uris also reminds his readers that even in the most horrid of conditions, there is love, honor, and strength. Deep love exists between several couples, and the descriptions of their moments together are poignant. Honor, integrity, and strength are described time after time in the actions of the Jewish people themselves as they struggle against the cruelty directed towards them.

Janice Decker

Rating: really liked it
Ah, the benefit of age and experience.

I read this book when it was first published in the 60s and thought it was wonderful. I see now that what I got from it was incredibly deep research into the story of the resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto.

While that story is compelling and heartbreaking, I wonder if Mila 18 could even be classified today as a "novel." The characters are two dimensional and serve essentially as plot devices rather than as real people. Even in historical novels, character should drive plot, not the other way around, and in Mila 18, the plot drives the people.

I'd also forgotten the large chunks of exposition in which Uris shares with us his research notes. While I certainly appreciated re-learning the history of the growth of Zionism and lots of detail about the Polish Army, Uris was given wide latitude by his publisher. He was, of course, a best selling author but still: this time around, I skimmed and skipped entire chapters. Despite the intense subject matter, this time the book was boring. The characters were not only two dimensional, but they keenly reflected the stereotypes of the 60s.

We've come a long way in understanding and depicting human beings.

Sharon

Rating: really liked it
A compelling, dramatic account of the Rising in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Doreen Petersen

Rating: really liked it
Outstanding book! I really like Leon Uris as an author with his insight and writing style.

Deborah Pickstone

Rating: really liked it
I am left stunned by this story. It is a story; not a lot is known about what actually happened, about who were the participants, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and here a riveting story has been crafted around the known facts. But even the known facts are astonishing; that a group of essentially unarmed Jews in the Ghetto that had been created by the Nazis took on the German war machine and held out for 42 days - longer than Poland itself.

There is surviving testimony as to what took place but it hardly matters - it is the sort of action that was bound to become mythologised. Even, recent research suggests, to the point of the person supposed to have led the Jews in their revolt never having existed. Well, someone led them and very competently too, obviously.

I cried. And I have to agree, pacifist that I am and all, that the one justification for fighting is a refusal of tyranny.