Warsaw Boy: A Memoir of a Wartime Childhood

The remarkable true story of the horrors and occasional joys of a boy soldier in war-torn Poland

In the autumn of 1944, 16-year-old Andrew Borowiec, wearing two left shoes and bleeding from numerous shrapnel wounds, limped into a German prisoner-of-war camp.

Andrew was one of the youngest boy soldiers who fought in the Warsaw Rising, witnessing the worst street fighting since Stalingrad. Wounded in the leg, he emerged from the sewers and gave himself up, taking a chance as a prisoner of war.

In the prison camp he secretly kept a diary on toilet paper, and this became the basis of his extraordinary tale of survival and defiance.