Excerpt from The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The truth was unavoidable: Witold knew that Poland had lost its independence once again, and that the question facing him—every Pole—was whether to surrender or to fight on knowing that to do so was futile. Witold could never accept the first option. On September 13, German bombers caught them again in the town of Włodawa, 150 miles east of Warsaw, but at least there Witold found an officer he'd known from the Bolshevik campaign—Major Jan Włodarkiewicz—who was preparing to take a stand. The major, a short, powerfully built man who carried himself like a boxer, had received orders to gather at the Hungarian border. Like Witold, he'd been picking up stragglers, and together they had a company. But then on their way to the border they bumped into Major Gawryłkiewicz, still chauffeured, and other command staff in their own cars. The officers looked surprisingly unruffled and explained that they planned to rally outside the country to continue the fight. For Witold that was tantamount to desertion and he protested, but they just shrugged and drove away.

That left Witold and Jan to come up with their own plan. There was no sense in continuing toward the border, which was sure to attract German attention sooner or later. So they made for the woods, where they could stage hit-and-run attacks and maybe find enough like-minded souls to plan a bigger operation. Over the following days they attacked several German convoys and even a small airstrip, blowing up a plane, but Witold knew such attacks didn't achieve much. German checkpoints were springing up everywhere, forcing them to keep to the thickets and marshes and scrounge for food in the woods or from isolated peasants. To make matters worse, it rained constantly. Water coursed down their backs in rivulets and mud sucked at their feet.

At the end of September, they learned that Soviet forces had entered Poland from the east. Stalin claimed it was for the protection of Poland's minorities, but his intention was clear to most Poles; the Soviet dictator had decided to seize his share of the spoils. Any hope that Witold harbored of rallying enough men to stage a rally promptly evaporated. He had other worries to contend with now: given his family's reputation for resisting the Russians, Maria and the children were almost certainly in danger.

On September 28 Warsaw surrendered, and a few days after that the first snow fell. The city had held out for another fortnight after he'd left, much to the fury of Hitler, who had instructed his generals to darken the skies over Warsaw with falling bombs and drown the people in blood. The resulting aerial and artillery bombardment had left forty thousand dead and destroyed or severely damaged a fifth of the city's buildings. Schools, hospitals, and churches had been bombed indiscriminately. The Old Town was a ruin, and the city's new opera house, the largest in Europe, reduced to a few colonnades. Tens of thousands, newly homeless, squatted amid the debris.

Witold only heard rumors of the city's devastation. Huddled with Jan in some woods near the town of Lubartów, dirty and unshaven, Witold realized that the fight to reclaim the country wouldn't start there, but in Warsaw, where power resided. They ordered the men to dig holes and bury their weapons, and then they exchanged their uniforms for civilian clothes from the locals. Witold received an old sheepskin jacket.

As they headed west again, the men peeled off one or two at a time for home. Before reaching Warsaw, Witold decided to make a detour to Ostrów Mazowiecka, the town sixty miles to the north of the capital where Maria's mother, Franciszka, lived, hoping to find Maria and the children. He and Jan clasped hands and agreed to meet at his mother's flat in Warsaw in a couple of weeks' time. "We will finish what we have started," promised Jan.

***

Witold set off through the fields and picked his way through the brush for several days to reach the Bug River near Ostrów Mazowiecka. The swiftly flowing waterway had recently become the new border between German and Soviet forces. Russian troops patroled Witold's side of the bank. He hid until darkness fell and then persuaded a local fisherman to ferry him across the water in his skiff during a gap in the patrols. The vessel bobbed and weaved in the currents, but they made the far bank, where the Germans had strung lines of barbed wire. Witold found a way through and hurried on to Ostrów Mazowiecka, a few miles farther.

Excerpted from The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather. Copyright © 2019 by Jack Fairweather. Excerpted by permission of Custom House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.