The first fighting in the Second World War happened on Polish soil and continued there into April 1945. Poland was invaded first by Nazi Germany and then by Communist Russia. Twenty thousand of its officers were executed at Katyn. The British Government only officially recognised the Katyn massacre in the late 1980s, after the Russian parliament had condemned it.  Despite such grotesque cowardice, the connection with Poland is as strong as any that the British have ever established with a country not speaking English. And with each Pole who arrived in 1940 or stayed after 1945 there were memories and stories. Now we have a page-turning account of the life of a boy who was 12 when the war started and who fought as a 15-year-old soldier in the Warsaw uprising in 1944. Borowiec was the