On burning ground

On Burning Ground is the dramatic account of one man's improbable efforts to survive the Holocaust. Fleeing the slaughter in his Polish hometown of Novogrudek (Navaredok), Joseph Skakun assumes a series of false identities - first as a Christian, then as a Muslim, and finally as a recruit of the Nazi SS - in order to stay alive in the vortex of hell. Constantly fearing exposure and death, Skakun lives to see the downfall of the most brutal horror of the modern age. Finally emigrating to America, he tells his tale of nerve, dissimulation, and desperate inwardness to his son, who has recounted the tension and anguish of his father's struggle. Weaving philosophical meditations into his father's horrific wartime story, Michael Skakun offers a personal, yet epic, account of war and bloodshed, of unspeakable cruelty and unnameable crimes. With remarkable insight, Skakun uncovers a profound locus of experience, the twinning of fear and identity, as well as the complex and tortured relationship between the abuser and the abused.