Winner of The Polski Affair!

The lucky winner of The Polski Affair by Leon H. Gildin is bettycd of More Coffee?. Betty was chosen using a Monte Carlo simulation in excel. What can I say? I'm an engineer and for some reason random.org wouldn't work on my computer today!

I have notified Betty via email and will mail the book to her once I receive her mailing address. If I don't hear from her by this Friday, I will draw a new winner.

Thank-you to all who entered this giveaway, to author Leon H. Gildin who wrote a great book and also a great guest blog, and to Kim of On Point Communications for supplying me a review copy and a giveaway copy of this book.

If you are sad you didn't win, check out the great giveaways posted on my sidebar and stay tuned for another great giveaway that I will be posting later today!

Review and GIVEAWAY – The Polski Affair by Leon H. Gildin

There are some novels that stick with you long after you read them. I’m sure The Polski Affair will be one such novel for me.

The Polski Affair is a riveting historical fiction novel about a true life little know World War II incident at the Hotel Polski in Warsaw, Poland. After the destruction of the Ghetto in Warsaw and the Jews that lived in it, the survivors hidden in and around Warsaw started to hear strange tales about the Hotel Polski. It was rumored that if you had enough money, the Nazis would exchange you for Nazi prisoners of war in other countries.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and many Jewish people went to the Hotel Polski for a chance at escape. What they discovered was that there were no clear cut answers. People were leaving the hotel on 1st class trains, but where were they going? Were they escaping or being sent to concentration camps?

The story centers on Rosa Feurmann or Anna Adler and her husband Chaim Adler, as well as their best friends Avram and Feygl. These four live in Israel and have become family with the marriage of their children. After learning of a reunion of the Hotel Polski survivors, the past comes rushing back to Rosa and what she had to do to survive her stay at the Hotel.

I love how The Polski Affair told an exciting story, which had various shades of gray. It would be easy to always paint the Nazis as evil and Jewish people as good, but Gildin has interesting takes on both a Nazi Commandant and on Rosa herself which definitely cast them in the “gray” area.

The story itself was fascinating, but the characters were the real stars of the show. Gildin was able to draw fascinating characters. I liked how the two couples were friends and family. It was great that the novel extended well past WWII to resettlement in Israel. This is the part of the story that is missing so often in WWII novels.

Author Leon H. Gildin is a lawyer and he has a riveting courtroom scene in the novel when Rosa is a witness at the Commandant’s War Crimes Trail in Heidelberg. I couldn’t put it down!

Gildin had a wonderful guest post on Laura’s Reviews a couple of weeks ago. Please check it out and look for a special offer from Leon Gildin!

Overall, The Polski Affair is a great historical fiction novel about a riveting little known piece of history with great characters.

Book Source: Review Copy from On Point Communications, LLC. Thank-you!

Giveaway Details

Kim of On Point Communications has been kind enough to offer one copy of The Polski Affair by Leon H. Gildin for a giveaway.

If you would like to win a copy of The Polski Affair, please leave a comment about what intrigues you about the novel or Leon Gildin's guest blog.

As part of your comment, you must include an email address. If I can't find a way to contact you I will draw another winner.

For an additional entry, blog about this giveaway or post it on your sidebar. Provide a link to this post in your comment.

I will be using random.org to pick the winners from the comments.

This contest is only open to US and Canadian residents (Sorry!).

No P.O. Boxes.

The deadline for entry is midnight, Friday December 31st.

Good luck!

Guest Blog - Leon H. Gildin author of The Polski Affair

I am very excited today to have Leon Gilden, the author of The Polski Affair, as a guest on my blog. His novel sounds very intriguing and I can't wait to read it. Stay tuned for a review and giveaway of this novel in the near term future when I receive the book.

Inner conflict
by Leon H. Gildin, www.leongildin.com

Let me tell you something about myself and how I came to write an award-winning novel dealing with a woman's innermost thoughts.

Some thirty years ago I practiced law in New York and had a client who was a film and stage producer, intellectual and a professor of religious studies at a major seminary. One day he brought a friend into my office by the name of Abraham Shulman who was introduced as a newspaper man and author who wrote in both Yiddish and English.
Shulman and I got along well; he was a very bright guy, but a bit of a "noodnik" (a nuisance). He'd come into the office without an appointment, would sit and talk regardless of what I had to do and when it came time to pay a fee, he vanished. Nevertheless, I liked him and I would always read what he wrote and, if the truth be known, enjoyed his stories and his conversation.

One day Shulman came in with his latest "magus opus," a book entitled "The Case of the Hotel Polski," published by Holocaust Press and distributed by Schocken Books. Those names alone made me realize that it was something of value. I don't recall whether he ever told me what got him interested in the subject matter. "The Case of the Hotel Polski" was a bizarre and unbelievable story about a Nazi plot to trade Jews who survived the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 for Germans interned in foreign countries. A strange and hitherto unknown piece of the Holocaust.

The book consisted of a lengthy introduction dealing with Shulman's research and then recounted interviews with "guests" of the hotel, telling how they got there, what went on there and how they survived. It was fascinating and as Shulman said at the end of his introduction, words to the effect, the more that was learned, the more confused the conclusion.

I put the book away for, I don't know how long, but the stories of the survivors never left me. Years later, I reread it and decided that the material would make an absorbing stage play. I was familiar with playwriting but after two scenes it became obvious that there were so many characters that a play would not work. So back in the drawer it went, but I kept my notes in a separate folder.

I retired, came to live in Arizona and now I had time to write. I found the old folder with my notes and my scenes, I found the book but this time when I read it I underlined and copied those facts and those interviews that I felt would be relevant in telling the story.

It was my decision that an attractive woman who had survived the horror of the destruction of the ghetto and told her story would be the most intriguing. But one story was not enough. I had to introduce more characters, more action, more situations, all culled from the interviews. It was also important to show how absurd the Nazi plan was, assuming they truly believed what they sought to accomplish could, in fact, be accomplished.

Rosa opens the story in her own words. She survived for reasons over which she has no control and, subsequently, meets and becomes both friends and family with another couple who survived for reasons totally beyond their control. When Rosa, now known as Anna (you must read the book to understand why the name change), learns that there is to be a reunion of survivors at the hotel she is driven, not by reason and against the wishes of her friends and family, but by her own demons, to attend. Her feelings, her emotions, her lies, her guilt, are what drive her throughout the story, despite her relatively good life in Israel.

I have spoken on many occasion about the book and am always asked why I wrote the book from a woman's point of view. The answer is that the essence of the story is, to a degree, derived from Shulman's interviews. Writing from a woman's point of view came about naturally, and the more I wrote the easier it became. Easy because what happened to the characters in "The Polksi Affair" was not planned. Their survival was fortuitous, and the story simply told itself.

The book won an award for historical fiction. Every place mentioned in the book is real: the hotel, the prison, the ghetto, the cemetery. The characters, what happens to them and how they survive, mostly all fiction.

So the most I can ask of the reader is to see if they understand my reason, my motivation for writing the book. And it is only fair that the reader know that the book caused many people to ask me what happened to the families after the book ended. That was a puzzling question. People who read the book wanted more. So I recently completed a sequel with the working title, "The Family Affair." A new agent/publisher is being sought, and I promise that anyone who buys and reads "The Polski Affair" as a result of this blog on Laura's Reviews and gets back to me at www.leongildin.com with their thoughts, will be entitled to a free copy of the sequel.

So let's be in touch.