Excerpt from The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He found the place eerily quiet. Half of the town's seventeen thousand residents were Jewish, and most had fled to Soviet-occupied territory. Their shops and homes had been looted and in some cases occupied by Polish families. Franciszka lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of town. As Witold arrived he saw German vehicles parked in the yard of the brewery opposite the house, which had become the headquarters of the German secret police, or Gestapo. He made sure to enter the farmhouse from the rear. Franciszka was there—alive and safe—but she had no word on Maria. Witold went to sleep on the sofa in the living room while Franciszka poured herself a stiff drink.

Over the following days he learned about the brutal new racial order the Nazis had imposed on the town. The Germans had rounded up several hundred townsfolk, locked them in the school gymnasium, and divided the group into ethnic Poles and Jews. Most of the Catholics were quickly released, but the Jews were selected for work gangs. The Germans encouraged the ethnic Poles to abuse and beat the Jews and point out their shops for looting. As Jewish families were evicted from their homes, some of their Catholic neighbors jeered at them. Most residents, though, refused to follow the German lead. The town's mayor hid a family in his basement. Maria's parents did what little they felt they could, letting Jews fleeing through the town take apples from the orchard.

Witold doesn't say much about his time in Ostrów Mazowiecka. He likely felt dismayed by exhibitions of anti-Semitism among the locals, which clearly played into the Germans' hands. Each morning he woke up praying for Maria to come walking through the door with the children, and each night he went to bed fearing the worst.

Eventually, he must have surmised that Maria had remained in Krupa, perhaps hiding among friends, and he had to choose between waiting for his family and resuming the struggle against the Germans. He knew that the chance of finding her and the children if they were traveling was perilously small given the numbers of refugees streaming across the border. Either way, the decision was clear: country before family. On the morning of November 1, he borrowed a bicycle and set off for the long ride to Warsaw to meet Jan. It was All Saints' Day, when graveyards blossomed with candles and the living prayed for the dead, but Witold had no time for that: he was heading to Warsaw to fight.

Excerpted from The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather. Copyright © 2019 by Jack Fairweather. Excerpted by permission of Custom House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.