Former Polish foreign minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski is also an accomplished writer. In this account of Warsaw's suffering under the Nazi occupation, he tells the story of Polish resistance, whose climax was the abortive Warsaw Rising of August 1944.

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski was among Poland's leading political dissidents of the communist era. He spent severfal years in prison under Stalinism, and he was interned again under martial law in 1981. He worked as a lecturer at the Catholic University of Lublin.

In democratic Poland he carried on his earlier role as a champion of bringing Polish and Jewish nations closer together.