Even those who managed to avoid deportation or imprisonment and remained at home endured nearly a decade dominated by a prosaic daily struggle to keep fed and clothed, leading a life of miserable and hopeless monotony punctuated with horrific violence. Witnessing brutality and executions in the street was a common occurrence, and a reminder that nobody was safe.    

Kochanski covers in depth the fate of the Jewish population of Poland, which is more complex than commonly imagined. It involves observant Jews of various descriptions, non-observant Jews and Catholic Jews, assimilated and unassimilated Jews. While the overwhelming majority were rounded up and forced into ghettos before being exterminated, surprising numbers lived out the war in hiding, and in some cases quite openly. Others survived by fighting, either in partisan units, in self-preservation gangs, and even, unbelievably, in a Jewish militia serving under the Germans. There were those who, deported to Siberia, left the Soviet Union with the Polish army and, when it reached Palestine, deserted to join in the struggle for an independent Israel, in which some 3,000 of them would play a crucial part.

Occupied Poland was unlike anywhere else in Nazi-ruled Europe. Apart from the 400,000-strong Armia Krajowa, operating all over the country as a regular army, albeit underground, it had a London-based government-in-exile with a delegate government in Warsaw. This carried on a dogged struggle to maintain a semblance of the continuing existence of the Polish state, to keep the nation from falling apart. As well as bolstering morale through continuous protest against the doings of the Nazis, the liquidation of criminal collaborators and the rescue of individuals, it did everything to counteract the Germans' attempts to destroy all manifestations of cultural life in Poland. There was an underground university, schools, theatres, publishing houses and so on. The scouting movement carried on along with an astonishing number of activities as people fought to preserve a wisp of normality. It was this human struggle that was so sorely let down by history. 

One of the strengths of this book is the way in which it juxtaposes the aberrant horror people were enduring on the ground with the devious banality of the negotiations over their future; the heroism of those struggling for freedom with the tired impatience of their allies, who had no idea of what was really going on and did not much care, as long as they could bring the war to an acceptable end.