There is a scene in this book that will bring your heart to near stopping and Antonina Zabinski, the protagonist's response is among the most remarkable I have encountered. She writes of it that:

"Maybe their monstrous hearts contain some human feeling; and if that's so, then pure evil doesn't really exist".

That this observation comes from a woman who knows, really knows, that all that she holds dearest could fall victim to that same evil at any moment makes it even more remarkable.

To read of this scene alone and of Zabinski's observation anchored the book for me in an unexpected way.

A thousand thanks to Ackerman for writing up this account of Jan and Antonina Zabinski's life and of the WWII related struggles, genocide, occupations & destruction of Praga and Warsaw from 1935 - 1949 .

I should not have known much of this story without such a book as Ackerman's that makes the attempt to gather so much together for the reader about the Zabinski's and their world.

There is something imperfect and unsatisfying about the book's structure and the mixture of research material presented.

It could be that there is no straightforward way to put together a story of such people and such times without oversimplifying or mixing the bad and the good, the mundane and the heroic so Ackerman intelligently does not take the he easy way out, thus the reader is strangely confronted by it all in unequal measure yet at arm's length from much of it even so, but perhaps not needlessly? Maybe that's the way a story like this needs to be told in its entirety?