This remarkable book manages to overcome all of these obstacles. Halik Kochanski succeeds in drawing together all the disparate strands of this terrible story into a coherent account of what happened to Poland and her citizens between 1939 and 1945. She brings to the subject not only an impressive grasp of the military and political context, but also a balance, neutrality and honesty few could manage, combined with the intelligence, imagination and empathy necessary to grasp the true depth of the experience she recounts. She does not hesitate to dent the Polish comfort myths and received narratives in general, and some passages will make uncomfortable reading for those bred on them. 

With the confidence one would expect of a military historian, Kochanski covers the Poles' contribution to the war effort — in September 1939, at Narvik, during the fall of France, the Battle of Britain, at Tobruk, with the Polish navy and merchant marine, in the Atlantic and Arctic convoys, the bombing of Germany, the Battle of the Atlantic, the Warsaw Ghetto rising, at Monte Cassino, Ancona, Bologna, Falaise, Wilhelmshaven, in the Warsaw uprising, the defeat of the V2, the breaching of the Pomeranian Wall and the battle for Berlin. An unexpected treat is to learn that a Polish division, disarmed on crossing into Switzerland after the fall of France in 1940, was earmarked for the defence of the alpine passes should the Germans invade. Another is that it was parachutists from Poland, which was way ahead of its allies in the science, who trained the British parachute regiments. She stresses the vital contribution made by the Poles who cracked the Enigma codes and built the decrypting machine, the Bombe, and points out that if those of them who were captured and tortured in Poland had not kept the secret the advantage gained would have become worthless. She charts the Polish input in SOE and the sabotage of the German war effort by the Polish Underground, the Armia Krajowa, and quotes a 1945 British report according to which 48 per cent of all valuable intelligence gathered from the European mainland during the course of the war came from Polish agents. Her clear, measured prose makes military operations easy to follow, and her account is given life by well-chosen personal reminiscence and anecdote, some of it harrowing, some comic.

Few books about the Second World War dwell at such length on the experiences of civilians, but in the case of Poland the home front was the most important. Not that it was at home much: millions of civilians were deported thousands of miles to Siberia, to Kazakhstan, or to Germany as slave labourers. Blue-eyed blond children under ten were sent to be reprogrammed as German Aryans. Polish civilian refugees ended up in Iran, India, New Zealand and various parts of Africa, as well as all the countries of Europe. Others stayed in Poland, but often locked in ghettos and concentration camps or living in hiding. Kochanski concerns herself with the experience of each of these groups, and succeeds in conveying some measure of their sufferings.

People brought up in an urban middle-class culture were suddenly uprooted and confronted with the raw horror of a camp in which they were forced to wear lice-ridden pyjamas, sleep on bunks in wooden huts and perform manual labour on a starvation diet of disgusting swill. Others would be dumped in a forest clearing in Siberia and told to fell trees and build themselves houses, or sent to a collective farm in Kazakhstan and forced to scrabble around in the earth in order to feed themselves. The emotional as well as physical culture-shock is almost indescribable, but Kochanski illustrates it well with poignant examples.