A Match Made in Hell

The Jewish Boy and the Polish Outlaw Who Defied the Nazis


Larry Stillman from the testimony of Morris Goldner


This is the true story of Morris Goldner. As a young boy he witnessed, with his own eyes, Nazi horrors, somehow survives and then finds himself being mentored by a notorious criminal to stay alive. Their exploits eventually lead to sabotage against the Nazi's. This is an incredible survival story, told with courage and honesty; detailing experiences which unopen the spaces between good and evil particular to the hell that was WWII. I commend Morris' willingness to share his experiences in this important, and unique, Holocaust story.

"It was finally getting through to me that while the war lasted, my life could no longer be the same. Although I had not been happy going back and forth to school in Debica, now I felt like a prisoner in mu own home. Yet I had no idea how much better my life was compared to waht most families faced in the large cities." Pg. 25


"On another day I spent several fascinating hours - for I had never been a better student than when I learned about the weapons of war - reviewing the characteristics of various hand grenades." Pg. 37


"A howl of anguish rose suddenly to my left - cries of such piercing pain, it struck me as being almost inhuman in origin. I turned in that direction, toward the women's group, searching for Mama and Gita. I could not spot them, because soldiers had moved in among the frenzied women. What I saw taking place there, just meters away from where I stood, paralyzed me with such horror, I cannot find proper words to describe what I witnessed and what I felt. How can words describe such inhumanity?


This can't be happening! I thought at the time, and I think it anew each of the hundreds of times the scene replays itself, even now, in my nightmares. For this is what I see:


SS men are singling out all the women with babies and small children, brutally driving them at bayonet point toward the barrels. Give us your garbage! they are shouting in German. Put your babies in the barrels! The mothers are screaming louder than the children, They cannot believe they understand what the soldiers want them to do. The SS monsters push them harder, force them toward the barrels. Then one after another, they pry the babies from their mothers' protective arms and stuff the beautiful, innocent children into the barrels as if they are nothing more than freshly pickled cucumbers. As each barrel becomes filled with babies, the SS man slams its cover tightly into place and moves on to the next barrel." Pg 48


Encounter with the priest:
"'I am ashamed of my own people' - his precise words - 'both within the church and outside it. When the war ends and we have to answer to the rest of the world, what will we say? How will the Polish people face them?'"
Pg. 105


"Something gelled at that moment in the back of my mind, a hunger that had been there all along but had just now been given light and substance, like an image materializing on a sheet of photosensitive paper. From that moment on, it would remain in my consciousness, fixed indelibly, until my own plans for retribution could be put in action." Pg. 145

"It was at this moment the explosion blew apart the carriage I had just left. Projectiles of mangled steel splayed in all directions, destroying the carriages both immediately in front and behind, overturning several of the remaining cars and scattering others off the track.


I pulled myself deeper into the forest, wincing in pain from my bruised ribs and torn shoulder. I could have easily been killed three times over: by the force of the nearby explosion, or the carnage of flying glass and metal, or in my jump from the speeding train. This time I did not even try to understand why, once more, I had escaped with my life." Pg. 153
"In German-occupied homes the Russians spared no one, including the family pets. Men were forced to watch as their wives and daughters, screaming for mercy, were savagely raped by Russian soldiers - who, after having their way, slashed each German throat. From what I could tell, the Red Army authorities made no effort to reign in the barbarity. Stalin himself, I have since heard, shrugged off the rape and looting as 'having some fun' and 'taking a few trifles.'" Pg. 178


"And for the first time since my earliest missions with Kopec, I felt a vague sensation of uneasiness seeping down into the pit of my stomach, like water eroding rock. But this time it was not the anxiety of being caught, or tortured, or killed, or failing a mission that unnerved me so. It was something much less definable and far more paralyzing: 
The consternation of having survived, with no idea, no idea at all, of what to do about it." Pg. 179


Book 64

Crossed

By Ally Condie


This is the much anticipated second book to the YA dystopian fiction Matched. Given the conclusion to Matched, it should be no surprise that this book takes place outside of the Society. And strange as this may be, I missed it. There were some great parts of this book but it may be my least favorite in the series. There were some places I just wanted both the story and the characters to reach a little deeper and parts of the story where even my wide, wide net of suspended disbelief had to snicker. I look very forward to the next book which I have faith will continue the intriguing series and take the story to the next level.


Book 63

Forest of Hands and Teeth Book 2 & 3

The Dead-Tossed Waves
The Dark and Hallow Places


By Carrie Ryan


This YA series is probably the best series from a pure story telling perspective. Ryan writes an unpredictable story and is willing to take a lot of risks. By this I mean, in YA it is easy (and popular) to fall back on some of the simple formulas that teenage girls have fallen for time and time again. In my opinion, Ryan creates a much deeper story line by not taking that route. The result is much more difficult to endure as a reader, but far more rewarding. 


Book 61 & 62

Forever

By Maggie Stiefvater 


This is the third book in a young adult series which began with the book Shiver. The story is loosely about humans that turn into wolves under certain conditions and their struggle both internally to survive and thrive given their situation and their relationship with the external world and the small town they live in that does not understand. 


Other than that, here is not much I can tell you about the plot itself without giving far too much away. Let me just say that I highly recommend the series if you are into YA at all. It was a unique story with interesting characters and compelling language. Stiefvater has sentences or paragraphs sprinkled throughout her books that just move me. In her own words (from her blog): "I will sacrifice most anything in order to change someone's mood in a certain way. I can't do that without careful navigation of metaphor and character development." 

Book 60

His Dark Materials Series

The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass

By Philip Pullman

"'That's the duty of the old,' said the Librarian, 'to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.'" Pg. 32

"It was a fine thing to be free again. She knew that Pantalaimon, padding on wildcat paws besider her, felt the same joy as she did to be in the open air, even if it was murky London air laden with fumes and soot and clangorous with noise." Pg 99

"To be sure, there's a warm passion behind what you say. But if you give in to that passion, friends, you're a doing what I always warned you agin: you're placing the satisfaction of your own feelings above the work you have to do." Pg 138 John Faa

"Under his guidance she found out that having something to do prevented you from feeling seasick, and that even a job like scrubbing a deck could be satisfying, if it was done in a seamanlike way. She was very taken with this notion, and later on she folded the blankets on her bunk in a seamanlike way, and put her possessions in the closet in a seamanlike way, and used 'stow' instead of 'tidy' for the process of doing so." Pg 165

"The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else." Pg 335 Lyra plotting for Iofur Raknison

The Subtle Knife
"And all the time he was intensely aware of the girl She was small and slight, but wiry, and she fought like a tiger; his fist had raised a bruise on her cheek, and she was ignoring it. Her expression was a mixture of the very young - when she first tasted the cola - and a kind of deep, sad wariness." Pg 24

"The Texan got to his feet, whiplashed-lean and courteous. He looked as if he were not conscious of the strangeness of the occasion, but he was. His hare daemon, Hester, crouched beside him, her ears flat along her back, her golden eyes half closed." Pg 51 Lee Scoresby

"'For a human being, nothing comes naturally,' said Grumman. 'We have to learn everything we do.'" Pg 298


Books 57 - 59

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

By Brian Selznick 

Read this book in one sitting, cover to cover. Part written story, part illustrated - it draws you into the book as if you were one of the characters. This style provides an incredibly rich experience. The story itself is wonderful. A unique, mesmerizing experience.

"There it was, like an accusation, reminding Hugo that everything in his life had been destroyed." pg 130

Book 56

War

By Sebastian Jungar

In his introduction, Jungar has a warning for his readers: "In many cases I have shortened quotes from interviews and texts in order to ease the burden on the reader."

"The videotape I shot during the ambush in Aliabad shows every man dropping into a crouch at the distant popping sound. They don't do this in response to a loud sound - which presumably is what evolution has taught us - but in response to the quieter snap of the bullets going past. The amygdala requires only a single negative experience to decide that something is a threat, and after one firefight every man in the platoon would have learned to react to the snap of bullets and to ignore the much louder sound of men near them returning fire. In Aliabad the men crouched for a second or two and then straightened up and began shouting and taking cover. In these moments their higher brain functions decided that the threat required action rather than immobility and ramped everything up; pulse and blood pressure to heart-attack levels, epinephrine and norepinephrine levels through the roof, blood draining out of the organs and flooding the heart, brain, and major muscle groups." Pg 32 - 33

"Summer grinds on: a hundred degrees every day and tarantulas invading the living quarters to get out of the heat. Some of the men are terrified of them and can only sleep in mesh pup tents, and others pick them up with pliers and light them on fire. The timber bunkers at Phoenix are infested with fleas, and the men wear flea collars around their ankles but still scratch all day long. First Squad goes thirty-eight days without taking a shower or changing their clothes, and by the end their uniforms are so impregnated with salt that they can stand up by themselves. The men's sweat reeks of ammonia because they've long since burned off all their fat and are now breaking down muscle. There are wolves up in the high peaks that howl at night and mountain lions that creep through the KOP looking for food and troops of monkeys that set to screeching from the crags around the base. One species of bird sounds exactly like incoming rocket-propelled grenades; the men call them RPG birds and can't keep themselves from flinching whenever they hear them." Page 54

"Reporters often think that taking cover from small-arms fire is the same thing as getting pinned down, but its not. Getting pinned down means you literally can't move without getting killed." Page 55

"Mobility has always been the default choice of guerilla fighters because they don't have access to the kinds of heavy weapons that would slow them down. The fact that networks of highly mobile amateurs can confound - even defeat - a professional army is the only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the course of history. Whether that is a good thing or not depends on what amateurs you're talking about - or what empires - but it does mean that you can't predict the outcome of a war simply by looking at the numbers. " Pg. 83

"The idea that there are rules in warfare and that combatants kill each other according to basic concepts of fairness probably ended for good with the machine gun. A man with a machine gun can conceivably hold off a whole battilion, at least for a while, which changes the whole question of what it means to be brave in battle. In World War I, when automatic weapons came into general use, heavy machine gunners were routinely executed if their position was overrun because they caused so much death. " Page 140

"The enemy now had a weapon that unnerved the Americans more than small-arms fire ever could: random luck. Every time you drove down the road you were engaged in a twisted existential exercise where each moment was the only proof you'd ever have that you hadn't been blown up the moment before. An if you were blown up, you'd probably never know it and certainly wouldn't be able to affect the outcome. Good soldiers died just as easily as sloppy ones, which is pretty much how soldiers define unfair tactics in war.
 Pg 142

"War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. It's insanely exciting." Pg. 144

"On and on it went, lives measured in inches and seconds and deaths avoided by complete accident." Page 197

"It's a miraculous kind of antiparadise up here: heat and dust and tarantulas and flies and no women and no running water and no cooked food and nothing to do but kill and wait." Pg 222

"Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up. War is so obviously evil and wrong that the idea there could be anything good to it almost feels like profanity. And yet throughout history, men like Mac and Rice and O'Byrne have com home to find themselves desperately missing what should have been the worst experience of their lives. To a combat vet, the civilian world can seem frivolous and dull, with very little at stake and all the wrong people in power. These men come home and quickly find themselves getting berated by a rear-base major who's never seen combat or arguing with their girlfriend about some domestic issues they don't even understand. When men say they miss combat, its not that they actually miss getting shot at - you would have to be deranged - it's that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life." Pg 234

"War is a big and sprawling word that brings a lot of human suffering into the conversation, but combat is a different matter. Combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with, and any solution to the human problem of war will have to take into account the psyches of these young men. For some reason there is a profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life, and combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly." Pg 234

"The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly." Pg 239

Book 55