ABOUT THE BOOK.

“Between the Devil and Deep Blue Sea” is the first volume of a trilogy “The Journey”. In this volume the author utilizes his personal experiences to form a skeleton where the fabric of the world around him is probed, scrutinized, analyzed and criticized. The volume begins with the world of prewar Poland as seen through the eyes of a very young boy. After the outbreak of WWII, the boy is thrown, at the age of 11, into a war environment and has to run for life to the eastern regions of Poland just barely ahead of the advancing Nazi army. After surviving the siege of Lvov he experiences the Soviet occupation followed by imprisonment in a Gulag. Here he goes through a precocious maturing process and learns how to view the world around him in a skeptical fashion. After release from the camp, subsequent to Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, he makes his way down the Volga River to the Caspian Sea and ultimately to Turmenbashi, the most southern port of the Caspian Sea. There he embarks on a 2,000 km. train journey, through Kara Kum and Kyzyl Kum deserts, to Almaty in Kasakhstan. Here the author encounters war time life in this Soviet Union Central Asian republic that includes two life threatening experiences. After the end of war he returns to Poland where he sees, this time, through the eyes of a prematurely matured teenager, the tragedy of post war Poland. The sojourn in Poland is quickly terminated by an illegal “border hopping” ending in a D.P. (Displaced Persons) Camp in Germany. The live in Germany is directed primarily towards the accomplishment of three goals: survival, pursuance of education and acquisition of an entry visa to the United States. The book ends with reaching the third goal.