The Bravest Battle

It is easy and understandable to engage in hyperbole when writing an historical account of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.  Dan Kurzman does this a bit in his “The Bravest Battle: The Twentieth Eight Days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.”  Rather than let the story tell itself, he sometimes interjects his own enthusiastic voice.

But by and large he sticks to the facts as we know them.  The book's sources are meticulously noted, and range from German files and photographs, courtroom accounts, eyewitness interviews, and assortment of documents and secondary sources.

In the end Kurzman has written a compelling account of a most improbable military engagement.  And he never once forgets the terrible conditions of those both living and fighting in the ghetto had to endure.