ISAAC'S ARMY

A sweeping and stirring saga of survival, ISAAC'S ARMY tells the Jewish resistance in Poland during World War II. This underground war spanned seven years, from the earliest Nazi invasion in 1939 through the Soviet takeover in 1946, and tells an unknown story of Jewish heroes, unlikely alliances with the Polish resistance and the founding of Eretz Israel. While many associate the Jewish resistance with the tragic 28-day Warsaw Uprising of 1943, the story is not only much broader but more complex as well.

This is the narrative non-fiction account of a group of dedicated young Jews barely out of their teens who banded together to form one of the most daring underground movements of WWII.

Contrary to popular belief, Jewish resistance during the Holocaust did not begin and end with the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It spanned the entire war and its immediate aftermath, and this book offers the first narrative non-fiction account of this struggle--from the earliest acts of defiance in 1939, to the 1944 Warsaw city-wide revolt, the biggest and bloodiest uprising of WW II with 250,000 casualties, and to the underground exodus to Palestine in 1946.

As it became clear that a Holocaust had begun in Europe, the Warsaw Ghetto became the hub of an increasingly organized conspiracy whose tentacles reached into every other ghetto in Poland. Hunted by both the Gestapo and the Polish collaborators, known as Greasers, the members of the Movement had to devise cunning schemes to hide, house and feed the Jews still left after the liquidation of the Ghetto in May 1943. They participated in some of the fiercest battles in the East-West conflict of 1944 and resolved to get Poland's remaining Jews to Israel after the arrival of the Red Army in 1945, whatever the cost.

Brzezinski tells the remarkable story of this underground odyssey, interweaving explanatory and historical background with a gripping narrative and inspirational, irresistible characters.

After working for the New York Times in Warsaw in the early 1990s, Matthew Brzezinski served as Moscow correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. Following the September 11th attacks, he covered homeland security as a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of Casino Moscow (2001), Fortress America (2004), and Red Moon Rising (2007). He lives in Washington, D.C.