Comrades, Avenge Us

by Stephen Esrati

Based on a true story, a novel follows two officers -- American and Canadian -- who are captured by the German Gestapo while on a mission in Yugoslavia and survive to form a postwar Nazi-hunting operation to avenge their slaughtered comrades.

The author, Stephen G. Esrati, on how this book came about:
On a visit to what was then Yugoslavia, my family and I visited the Museum of Hostages in Begunje near Bled. On one steel door of the prison, we found inscriptions in English, left by British Lieut. Douglas Maxwell Watt. All attempts to find Watt through the British Ministry of Defense failed because officials needed his permission to release data. Alas he was dead. His family told a newspaper in Britain that helped me that Watt never revealed what he was doing in Yugoslavia. So I fictionalized his story into my novel, originally published by Commonwealth Publications. Under an agreement with Commonwealth, that firm gave up all title to my novel. Since the book was printed, I have learned that Watt was in MI-6, the Secret Intelligence Service -- which presumably means that he was not in Yugoslavia to fight the Germans but to spy on Marshal Tito. Many readers have commented that the book does not read like fiction. I have to confess that much of it is not. It is historical fiction and my afterword explains what is real and what is fiction. Unfortunately, some legal beagle stuck a disclaimer at the front of the book saying everything was fiction. If you read my book, therefore, you will come across such "fictional" characters as Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and deGaulle, such villains as Adolf Eichmann and Odilo Globochnik, and such sports heroes and heroines as Petra Burka and Emil Zatopek. And you will read about the Malmedy Massacre of American POWs and the Normandy Massacre of captured Canadians.