Well I leapt at the chance to read this book, as I loved every minute of my week in Poznan a few years back. But it's fair to say this is not really successful holiday reading. There are certainly elements to it that aren't that successful at all, for this dumps the newbie like me right into the Poznan Fortress – a last redoubt of Nazi resistance as the Soviets swamped Poland, reaching the current Germany/Poland border, and landing the few thousand Nazi soldiers and tank drivers with the impossible task of defending a Citadel close to the city centre until relief came. It didn't.

The way this book felt was that everybody knew every detail about what happened – the editors correcting the author's recollections concerning enemy barrel dimensions, amongst other things – except the reader, and that that was our fault. I'm damned sure it's a major factor in the twentieth century history of Poland, Germany and Russia, but without any context or introduction the minutiae here don't really work. Still, the book is mostly a (slightly naively written) first-hand account of modern-ish urban tank warfare, so I dare say it's also something the likes of which you've never read, unless you've got that specialism already.

For the final third or so it becomes a report of life in a Soviet POW camp close to the Arctic Circle, which has many many similarities to Holocaust biographies bar the nationalities with the power and those without. Again, this ends slightly awkwardly, and once more we have to fill the gaps in ourselves. A great book for the British market would add in a little about what's become of the Citadel, and the career of our author after the events of these pages. This isn't a great book, but merely presents a straight (uncredited) translation of the Polish text, written for a very different market, and it shows.

An inspirational book about the hardships encountered during the last days of the war against Russia by Germany. It was truly educational to learn about the events that occurred and how the author survived.

Thank you to #NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.