The survival of love

Here, for the first time, he tells the full story of his wartime experiences: from his mobilization into the Polish army in August 1939 and his marriage to Eileen (a British girl who was visiting Warsaw) to his eventual reunion with her in November 1945, in London. The intervening years were a harrowing experience for both Józef and Eileen. Separated by the German attack on Poland in 1939, Eileen made the decision to remain in Warsaw, while Józef fought at the front. Wounded in the campaign, Józef managed to reunite with his wife, now working at a military hospital. Together they joined the Polish underground, fighting a secret war against the Gestapo. Betrayed by a former schoolmate in April 1943, Józef Garliński was arrested and sent, without any proof of guilt, to Auschwitz. Eileen remained in Warsaw, surviving the uprising of August and September 1944, in which 250,000 people died. When the Red Army invaded Poland, she fled the country, travelling to Odessa in a Russian cattle-truck, (the only woman in a group of freed British prisoners of war) eventually arriving in Glasgow in April 1945 after a long voyage by ship. Józef also survived, and although a serious attack of typhus fever almost prevented him completing his journey in search of Eileen, providence again won out. Via Frankfurt, Heidelberg and Paris, Józef Garliński was finally reunited with his wife in London. Garliński's book is both a remarkable historical document and a moving testimony to the power of love to overcome extraordinary adversity. -- from dust jacket.