Agent Zigzag, by Ben Macintyre

I request that my local library buy this book, because it sounded like such a hoot that I thought a lot of people would by interested in it. Agent Zigzag, by Ben Macintyre, is the true story of a double agent named Eddie Chapman.

Eddie Chapman was a not-so-small-time crook in the 1930s. He helped run a gang of safecrackers in London. (Well, not so much safecrackers, since what they really did was blow them up.) He was captured by British police on the island of Jersey and put into prison just before the war started. When the Germans invaded the island, Eddie saw a chance to get out and volunteered to spy for the Germans. As soon as he got back to England, he immediately turned himself in and volunteered to spy for Britain. For the rest of the war, he was a British spy and managed to keep the Germans convinced of his loyalty all the way until the end of the war. There are a couple of comments in the book from the British agents (part of the Twenty Committee) about why Chapman became a double agent and why he chose to go back to the continent after being relatively safe in Britain. The conclusion seems to be that he did it for the adventure. He must have been one of those guys who needs constant, terrifying excitement in order to be happy.

Agent Zigzag has two things going for it. First, the story is incredible. If it weren’t so well documented, you’d have a hard time believing any of this was real. Chapman was incredibly charming and lucky; he got away with things that I don’t think anyone else has before or since. Second, Macintyre does a wonderful job writing this story with the flair that it deserves. One of the reasons that I don’t read non-fiction much is because I often find them slow going, dull in many places, and/or the writers don’t have the knack for making the subjects come to life. The people in this book pop off of the page and there is rarely a dull moment.

I read this book in about three days. This is a personal record for me; it’s the shortest time I’ve every spent reading a work of non-fiction. If you know any WWII buffs or people who are into espionage, I really recommend this book.

A Writer at War, Part III, Addenda

I forgot to post this bit.

In one of the footnotes in the last or second to last chapter (I returned the book to the library yesterday, and it’s been checked out again by someone else, so I can’t find this bit), the editors incorrectly identified the Holocaust musem in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem. It’s not Vad Yashem.

If you guys are reading this, you’ll want to correct that for the reprints and later editions.

A Writer at War, Part III

I made it to Berlin last night, just like I thought I would. And I’ve seen again how Grossman’s journals would have put him in a gulag if anyone had read them at the time.

According to Grossman, as soon as the Red Army crossed into non-Soviet territory, it seems like they started doing the same things to the population there that the Nazis had done when invaded the Soviet Union three years before. The Red Army raped and looted their way from Poland to Berlin. For all their ideas about fighting a moral war against the evil empire as they saw it, the Red Army indulged in a lot of revenge.

In a way, it makes me think about all the things that are going on today–the abridgement of civil liberties, all the secrets about what’s going on with the terror suspects that have been captured. To me, it looks like another country has forgotten its high ideals and sunk to the level that the other guys were playing at, the guys we went to war against. I’m going to stop there, because this is not a political blog and I feel a rant coming on.

So, let’s rewind a bit. I really enjoyed A Writer at War, and I’m glad I had my local public library buy it and add this book to the library collection. It’s exceedingly well written, thought-provoking, inspiring, and enlightening. If you know anyone who likes war memoirs or good history nonfiction, you might want to recommend this book to them.

A Writer at War, Part II

I steamed through about two years of war and more than 100 pages last night. Normally, I don’t read nonfiction because it bores the life out of me, but I have been completely drawn into Grossman’s war notebooks. They’re so full of sketches of Red soldiers and vignettes of battle, it’s like I’m one of those Russian citizens who fervently read Krasnaya Zvezda for news of what was going on at the front. Grossman has been dead for more than forty years, and the war has been over for more than 60 years, but his words are so evocative that it’s like he’s still a war correspondent.

Grossman also covered the discovery and liberation of Majdanek and Treblinka. As I was reading his description of what he found there, I wondered–as I always do when I read about concentration camps and the Holocaust–why I couldn’t stop myself from reading about the horrors of the camp. As I was thinking about this, I came across this passage:

“Someone might ask: ‘Why write about this, why remember all that?’ It is the writer’s duty to tell terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it. Everyone who would turn away, who would shut his eyes and walk past would insult the memory of the dead. Everyone who does not know the truth about this would never be able to understand with what sort of enemy, with what sort of monster, our Red Army started on its own mortal combat.” (301)

One thing that really got to me during these chapters was the fact that the Soviet authorities didn’t want people to know what the Nazis were doing to the Jewish populations of the occupied territories. The editors of the text wrote that the Soviets didn’t want the Jews to be singled out as “special victims.” And they also didn’t want people to know how much collaboration went on between the Nazis and the Ukrainians in their territory.

So only a few of Grossman’s pieces on Majdanek and Treblinka got published in his paper. But Grossman found other avenues. His piece, “The Hell Called Treblinka,” was actually quoted during the Nuremburg Trials.

*****

There are less that 50 pages left of A Writer at War. So, I’ll probably be in Berlin with the Red Army by the end of the day.

A Writer at War, by Vasily Grossman, Part I

The public library I use just got in a big shipment of books–some of which are one’s I’ve requested. So I’ve had to take a break from House of Leaves, so that I can get A Writer at War read during the two weeks I have it.

It’s kind of a radical change to go from experimental fiction to a war diary. But I’m enjoying it a lot–I’m enjoying it so much that my engrossment in this book got commented on last night when I went out to eat by the host.

A Writer at War is basically the notebooks that Vasily Grossman kept while he was a war correspondent with Krasnaya Zvezda, the Red Army newspaper, with occasional comments from the editors to help explain the army slang and Russian culture. Grossman was with the Red Army from about a year before Stalingrad to 1945, when the army rolled into Berlin.

I knew a little about Eastern Front from my history classes, but as I read Grossman’s notebooks I feel like I’m learning even more about what happened. Not only do you get an overview of what’s going on on the entire front, but you also get vignettes and stories from the soldiers. Grossman also provides commentary about what he thinks about the war. And, even though it was very dangerous for him to do so, he was honest about what happened. (During the Russian retreats, Stalin and the Party didn’t want people to write or even talk about what was really happening. Grossman quoted one of the newspapers to demonstate this point: “The much-battered enemy continued his cowardly advance” (11). If Grossman’s notebooks had been found and read by the wrong people, he might have faced a visit from the NKVD.)

The best thing about reading Grossman’s notebooks is that I feel like I’m getting the information straight from Grossman–it’s not filtered or censored.