Reviews for You'll need a guardian angel

The average rating for You'll need a guardian angel based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-09-13 00:00:00 Yvonne Smith I've read many fiction and nonfiction books about WWII and the Holocaust, but any that dealt with Poland dealt with the Jews in Poland. I don't remember ever reading about the horrific treatment of the Poles by the Soviets. It was eye-opening, frightening, thought-provoking, chilling, and yet an amazing tribute to the resilience of the human spirit and survival in unimaginable circumstances. Adamczyk's memory of the events of his childhood is remarkable. It seems impossible that he could recall conversations in such complete detail (more likely that discussions with his older siblings influenced his memories), but that did not detract from the content for me. Writing from the point of view of his younger self, he creates a compelling narrative that kept me turning pages even though I knew he had survived and thrived after reaching the United States. I do wish he had briefly told us what happened between his enrollment in school and his return to Poland, but that is a minor issue in a book that lays bare the brutality of Marxist philosophy and the complicity of FDR and Churchill in the cover-up of war crimes. Perhaps the most telling quote from the book is in the Afterword on page 240: ". . . the early Russian Communists were committed to the Marxist conviction that 'the workers of the world' were brutally oppressed by the upper classes. Undeniably, in many cases they were. But under Lenin and Stalin, this philosophical assertion was quickly turned into a political principle that claimed that all persons in the upper classes were oppressors. Anyone in a position of power or authority or who owned property became a target for vengeance. Eventually even the local baker and shoemaker, who were eking out a living, were suspect in the eyes of the Communists; whoever did not toil for the state was perceived to be an 'oppressor' and an 'enemy of the people.' Intoxicated by this principle, the Russian Communists attempted to eradicate their 'class enemies' in the hopes of creating a paradise for the downtrodden workers." The propaganda and omissions for political expediency, power, and stability that this book reveals force us to face the fact that humanity has not learned from past experience. The desire of philosophically driven political ideologies to take revenge on those they blame for their oppression -- and the attempt to "justify" such behavior -- is as strong today as it was in the past.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-06-05 00:00:00 Fernando Rodriguez An excellent insight on the plight of Poles during WWII. The work follows a seven-year-old boy, Wes Adamczyk, whose father was murdered by the Soviets in the Katyn Massacre and the rest of his family deported to Kazakistan. The reader is taken directly into young Wes' world, and through his eyes witnesses the torture and killings that became so commonplace in everyday life. Very little is known about the horrors endured by Poles who found themselves under Soviet rule. Their story (as with other nations that fell under Stalin's boot) must be told and retold and never forgotten. This must have been extremely painful for Wes to relive such a horrific time and to put it into words.