The Polski Affair and The Family Affair -Thirty years in the making

Today, I am pleased to welcome Leon Gildin, the amazing author of The Polski Affair and The Family Affair to Great Thoughts’ Great Authors. These books are the story of survival during World War II.  Must reads!

Here’s Leon:

Shorty after the publication of “The Polski Affair” in 2009, a reviewer started his review by saying, “Just when I think I know all the bits of WWII history, something new comes along that surprises and shocks me. Such is Leon H. Gildin’s tale of the 1943 goings on at the Hotel Polski.”

As an author, I took this as a compliment. Bringing to light an aspect of the Holocaust which, aside from Abraham Shulman’s research work entitled “The Case of Hotel Polski,” can be found only in the Yad Vasham in Israel is an act in which one can have pride. When the accomplishment is recognized by the International Book Awards and given the 2010 award for historical fiction, it is even more rewarding.

At another time and far from Arizona, where I now reside, I practiced law in New York. One of my clients was Abraham Shulman who was a writer in both Yiddish and English. He was bright, he was amusing and he had lots of ideas. One day, some thirty or more years ago, he came in with a signed copy of his latest work, “The Case of Hotel Polski.” It had been published by The Holocaust Press and distributed by Schocken Books.

I don’t know how many copies of the book were ever sold but I do know that I read it, I found it fascinating. I reread it, I underlined portions of it and I knew that someday I would do something with it.

“The Case of Hotel Polski” had a lengthy introduction in which Shulman told about the history of his investigation of that which took place at the Polski after the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. This set the scene for that which followed, namely interviews with people who had survived their time at the Polski. The stories were fascinating, in many cases almost unbelievable and became the kernel of the fictional portrayals of Rosa, Itzik, the Colonel and others in “The Polski Affair.”

In that we now live in the days of the computer I sought whatever additional information I could find about the Hotel Polski on the internet. The result was amusing in that when Hotel Polski was typed in, the results showed that there was a Hotel Polski in almost every city in Poland since the words themselves mean Polish hotel.

My original thought was to write a play, a format with which I was more familiar. By the time I got to the second scene of the first act I had so many characters that I knew it would never work. I put the project aside for many years but it stayed with me. When the time was ripe and the opportunity presented itself, I started to write the novel. I went back, again and again to Shulman’s book, to reread the facts and the interviews and little by little the characters took shape and the story emerged.

All places mentioned in the novel are historically true. Even the incident of the abandoning of the train in a field is true. The characters, the dialogue and the situations are fiction.

In reading “The Polski Affair,” my hope is that you contemplate why the Germans did what they did and what they hoped to accomplish. With these questions in mind, immerse yourself in those harrowing days that Rosa and the others went through. I’d love to hear not only your answers but your questions pertaining to what so many readers ask: So what happened next? That’s where “The Family Affair,” the new sequel to “The Polski Affair,” comes in.

What are you reading and where are you going?

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