Book Review: Mila 18 by Leon Uris

There’s nothing quite like a good book to pass the festive season so I begin planning my big Christmas read sometime in October.  The criteria are fairly simple:  it must be an epic – must consist of more than 400 pages – and must not have been written any later than 1980 (I’m flexible on this one).

I’ve had some beauts I must say.  Highlights include Roland Huntford’s “The Last Place on Earth” (Christmas 97) and Adam Zamoyski’s “1812” (Christmas 2006).  But Christmas 2011 may have provided me with the best read yet – Leon Uris’ “Mila 18” – a work of historical fiction describing the Jewish Ghetto uprising of Warsaw in May 1943.

Much has already been written about the Holocaust of course – of how a Ghetto (or “group area”) of some 300 000 Jews was systematically whittled down (via deportation and extermination in the camps of Treblinka and Majdanek) to less than 60 000 persons. 

Yet popular culture is remarkably thin on what happened next – when a hardy band of Jewish fighters from across the political spectrum, joined forces to fight back and avenge their honour as a people.Painfully low on all vital resources, this resourceful band of Jews used ingenuity and raw courage to stockpile not just a meagre cache of weapons but food and medical supplies too.  Though they figured on holding out a week, they went to war regardless – believing that to die on their own terms was preferable to being led away to a humiliating death in the gas showers.  Yet no-one, perhaps not even themselves, could predict how effective they would be.

In short, this rabble or untrained militants – mostly young men, women and children – without a single decent weapon (often resorting to throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails alone) – held the world’s most powerful military force at bay for forty two days and forty two nights.  That’s longer than the whole nation of Poland was able to hold the German Army when it invaded in September 1939 – and nearly 3 weeks longer than the nation of Holland held out against the same adversary.

As one of the key protagonists observes in a final diary entry:

“I look through the books of history and I try to find a parallel.  Not at the Alamo, not at Thermopylae did two more unequal forces square off for combat”

Tragically – and inevitably – the resistance was savagely crushed.  The Germans - once they’d recovered from the initial Jewish Blitzkrieg - torched the Ghetto and, quite literally, gassed its inhabitants from their hiding places.  The majority were deported to the camps.  Most of the militia fought to the death.  A few escaped in the sewers and lived to tell the tale.

Yet in spite of all, this singular act of defiance remains the stuff of legend.  As the Spartan warrior Stelios says to a newly disarmed - (watch the movie, you'll see what I mean) Persian emissary in Zack Snyder’s stirring movie “300”:

“Go now, run along and tell your Xerxes that he faces free men here, not slaves”

And as King Leonidis says before the first Persian charge:

“Remember this day men.  For it will be yours for all time”

And the Jews of the Ghetto uprising joined with a stirring:  “haroo! Haroo!”

Anyone wanting to know more about the Ghetto uprising might be interested in this video