I bought this book when I saw it on Amazon.co.uk. I couldn’t not, and I wanted to tell you about it. It is a love story, set in the darkest of times and true.

Jack and Rochelle have written this account of their life during the occupation of Poland, first by the Russians, and then by the German Nazis.  I resented having to put the book down, I inhaled it, absorbed it.

As an historian I know a great deal of the war and its various facets but I still can’t understand the holocaust. I’m not sure that anyone can if they haven’t experienced it. But even if they have, how can they understand it. It is an aberration, a stain that will never fade; the mechanised murder of a race. Yes there were millions of others too. Poles, soviets, gypsies, but it was the anti-semitic determination to exterminate a whole race (in its millions)  that was the driving force.

Jack and Rochelle shows a different facet of this appalling time. It highlights the fact that throughout Europe the Jews fought back, and this is seldom known, or if it is, perhaps not accepted. But indeed they did. Some singly, some in groups, there were the revolts in concentration camps like Treblinka, and what about Warsaw?

During the war Poland was divided between Germany and Russia. Russia took the east, which is where Jack and Rochelle lived. The Soviets had a different official policy, one that  precluded  discrimination on the basis of ethnic or religious groupings. Yes there was anti-semitism, but not an officially orchestrated and managed terror. It was only when the Germans attacked the Soviets that the Jews in the east of Poland were in as great a peril as those already under the Nazis heel.

It was then that Jack and Rochelle made their own ways into the forests to escape their fate, just as the partisan group led by the Bielski brothers had, as recorded in Defiance written by  Nechama Tec.

Jack and Rochelle is a memoir that charts the protagonists’ lives as they gathered together in the forest, disparate runaways who formed a partisan group,  living underground in the harshest of conditions, and through the freezing winters. They were often hunted by their enemies, sometimes discovered, but they fought free, survived, and started again. They existed as part of the resistance, knowing their enemy was not just the Nazis, but anti-semitic Poles and sometimes the Russian partisans. They were safe only for as long as they took this present breath, this next step, after that, who knew.

Jack and Rochelle’s love is a hesitant affair, and it is Jack’s absolute belief that he and Rochelle are destined a) find one another, and b) love one another until the end of their days, that gives such heart to this book. Jack and Rochelle is an understated, intelligent, matter of fact recollection of how people can survive if they live within a group, and are intent on surviving, organising and resisting. It is a triumph of the human spirit in a time which defies description. It is inspirational, and educational.

Beautifully edited by Jack and Rochelle’s son, author Lawrence Sutin.

There you are, you see, Jack and Rochelle survived, had a family and flourished. Bravo.

Read it.

Jack and Rochelle. Published by Daunt Books. £9.99