About:
The Polski Affair is an engaging novel that quietly drew me into its pages and left me feeling both shock and sorrow.
For a short book, this story packs a punch and is actually hard to review mainly because there are a few different things going on in the storyline.

Anna Adler is a Holocaust survivor living in Israel. The book goes from flashbacks to when Anna was incognito at the mysterious Hotel Polski to present day. Anna's first husband and her children were killed by the Nazi's. She is sent to the Hotel Polski disguised as a Polish maid in order to find out any information she can about what is going on there. There are all kinds of rumors surrounding the hotel.

While at the hotel, Anna meets a man named Chaim. He has also lost his family and the two of them bond quickly and fall in love.
One day, Anna is unexpectedly confronted by a Colonel who in charge of the Hotel Polski. He makes her his personal servant and Anna cannot refuse for fear of her life as well as Chaim's.
The Colonel is named Peter Hauptmann and he treats Anna as decently as can be expected. As the months pass, the two have an illegal affair.
When the Colonel is reassigned, he makes arrangements for Anna and Chaim to be sent overseas with new identities.
Years later after the war is over, Anna has never forgotten the Colonel and one day she is called upon to testify at the International War Crimes tribunal about his role at the Hotel Polski. Anna's past seems to forever haunt her.

An invitation has also been sent out for the 'guests' who survived Hotel Polski to come reunite and perhaps find closure.

My thoughts:
I had no idea what to expect when I began reading The Polski Affair. What I found here is an interesting take on an actual hotel where events were never fully reconciled.
The first part of the book took off a tad slowly for me. I think it was slow mainly because I was getting used to the flashbacks and the main characters. However, once the story took off, I was up late into the night reading.
I was shocked that Anna was made to be a Nazi's mistress. And even more stunned that she began to have feelings for him, especially after how her husband and children were murdered.
At the end of the book she does make a speech to her son where she justifies her actions a bit, as best as she can. I liked that she did that, it made me like her character a bit more.

The characters are interesting and the book is well written. This book is set during an atrocious time in history and I think the author did a good job at bringing these characters to life. The Holocaust survivors wonder why they survived, while so many did not, including their own loved ones.

There is one scene where a group of people, children included, are rounded up by the Nazi's and taken by train supposedly for 'freedom'. While on board, all the windows are covered with sheets so they cannot see where they are going. I found that scene bone chilling, just the thought of being at someone elses mercy like that.

I should mention there are some brief sexual scenes in the plot. I found those unexpected, but they fit in well with the storyline.

I enjoyed reading this one and when it was finished, I did wonder what would happened next. ( )

When the Warsaw ghetto was destroyed in 1943, the surviving Jews fled to the countryside or hid in the homes of sympathetic Aryans. In an elaborate scheme to encourage Jewish citizens to come out of hiding, the Gestapo promised to allow Jews from Warsaw who held foreign passports of neutral countries to leave Poland and travel to South America where they could find refuge. They used the Hotel Polski to house Jewish families who were preparing to emigrate. Nearly 2500 people came out hiding and moved to the Hotel Polski. Instead of finding safe passage out of Poland, Jews were instead transported to Vittel, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz when their passports were not recognized by South American governments. Jews without foreign passports were executed by the Germans at Pawiak prison. Only about 350 Jews who held Palestinian passports survived.

It is this historic event which serves as the backdrop to Leon Gildin’s novel The Polski Affair.

I was eager to read this book – the premise seemed promising and the novel won the 2010 International Book Award for Historical Fiction. Despite my high hopes, I found myself quickly disappointed. The narrator is a woman by the name of Rosa Herzog. She represents one of the few survivors of the Hotel Polski and tells her story in a dry voice, relating the events but lacking any real emotion. Her narrative bounces around quite a bit. Because of this, I felt largely unmoved by her story which read more like a history book than a first person narrative of a tragic event. I was distracted from the story repeatedly because of glaring typos and poor grammar (for example, on page 7 a sentence reads: “Just like Chaim and I.“). I could forgive one or two mistakes, but after stumbling over these types of sentences for 51 pages and finding my mind wandering, I finally put this book aside as one of the rare DNFs of the year.

I wanted to like this one, but I am afraid it is one of those self-published manuscripts that could have benefited from tighter editing.

Not recommended.

Unrated.

Okay. Let me take a minute to regroup. *Breathe* Wow. THAT was some GRIPPING reading! Having recently read Thaisa Frank's Heidegger's Glasses and getting somewhat confused but still liking it, I wasn't sure what I would think of this novel, since it centered around much the same time era, with the Jews and Nazis. Leon H. Gildin blew my mind away with this novel. It is emotionally gripping, powerfully captivating and I was shocked at the happenings that took place in this novel.

Leon Gildin did a fantastically phenomenal job at researching this book. Written to be fictitious, this novel of the Holocaust is haunting and felt so real to me. I know it IS a real event in history, but I felt like I was there, in the middle of the ghetto, death camps and among the Jews at Hotel Polski. Again, while written fictitiously, it is based on historical reality and the things the Jews endured in all those places during this horrific ordeal and their hopeful chance of seeking a safe passage to escape out of Poland, makes me shiver with disgust that an event like that, led by the Nazis, ever occurred.

I am truly glad I took the time to review this book. In this small, historically accurate 5 star novel, I became educated a little more on the happening of the Holocaust and the Jews. I literally read this book in ONE day, I became THAT engrossed in the story. This is highly recommended to everyone, but especially those that are interested in this specific era and events in world history. Well done, Leon! ( )

http://www.bostonbibliophile.com/2009/11/review-polski-affair-by-leon-gildin.htm... ( )

The Polski Affair, by Leon H. Gilden is an interesting and fascinating Holocaust novel, and one that is unique in many aspects. Hotel Polski, located in Warsaw, Poland, is the setting for the story line. The novel opens with a woman named Anna Adler, now living in Israel, reading and ad in a newspaper.

The ad is for a reunion of Holocaust Survivors which is to take place at Hotel Polski. Anna, was known at that time as Rosa Feurmann. She was part of a partisan group of individuals who operated out of a cemetery across the street from the hotel. The group had heard rumors that Hotel Polski was being used as a front by the Nazis…a front whereby Jews could purchase their freedom, receive foreign passports, and leave Warsaw for a safe environment in a neutral country. Jews were supposedly taken to the hotel from the Warsaw Ghetto, and interned there for weeks and/or months, awaiting their freedom. Rosa was given an assignment to somehow manage to get into the hotel and find out what was happening there.

From that point forward the story takes on a strange twist, and I won’t spoil the events that arise in the hotel, and will leave it at that.

Gildin writes with excellence, infusing vivid word images and descriptions throughout the pages. It isn’t a novel that is a fast read in the sense of it being a page-turner, as many novels of this order are. That doesn’t minimize the story line or the author’s writing. The Hotel Polski was a factual place, and Gildin has given us a story with an actual piece of history within the pages. The Polski Affair is unique in many aspects, and includes a surprise or two. Leon H. Gildin has given us a glimpse into World War II, the Holocaust and the Nazi mindset that is through an out of the ordinary perspective. ( )