Description
'It didn't occur to me to ask my father as I grew up why he had nothing from before the war... He was a man without a past, and I had failed to notice'Joe's War is a mesmerising and dramatic account of a daughter's search for her father's secret life, during and after the Second World War.For Annette Kobak there was always something mysterious about her father Joe, something dark. For forty-five years the reasons for his silence were left unspoken. His story, she discovered, was remarkable. Born in Czechoslovakia, he escaped, aged nineteen, from German-occupied Poland in the spring of 1940 and joined the Polish army in France, ending up intercepting Morse code in a top-secret unit in London.Behind Joe's silence, his daughter learned, were wide-ranging political hinterlands, including the quiescence of the West over Munich and over the betrayal of the Poles at the end of the war. Written from her own travels in her father's footsteps, interviews, a diary and from her father's first-person accounts, Joe's War is the work of an immensely gifted writer.A story about tact, love and trust slowly putting right the damage done by past trauma. But it is also... the story of the twentieth century Times Literary Supplement'Super eclectic mix of travelogue, oral testimony, autobiography and historical documents... Annette Kobak both reveals a Europe we never knew, and points up the importance of knowing it' Independent,
ISBN:9781844080793
