An indictment of the world , then and today - Rated 
Mila 18 is a breathtaking account of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, by the Jewish population of Warsaw, against the plans of the Nazi regime to exterminate them.
It is a great epic from the pen of one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, Leon Uris.
The Warsaw ghetto uprisings are an important symbol of the freedom and dignity of mankind and the ongoing struggle against totalitarianism and cruelty (particular that type of cruelty that is self righteously practiced by ideologues from the left and right.).
The key characters are:
Andrei Androfski , the indomitable hero of a prestigious Polish cavalry regiment , and also a proud Jew.
Gabriella Rak , Andrei's pretty Polish sweetheart , one of the rare voices of conscience in a world gone mad .
Deborah Bronski , the intriguing beauty , a figure of love and tragedy , Andrei's sister.
Paul Bronski , a shell of his man who ,lacks all conviction , driven by the willingness to please his masters and a strong desire to divorce himself from his roots.
Christopher De Monti , The Italian journalist and playboy who will come out of this as the voice that will bring a disturbing hidden truth to the world.
Rachael Bronski : Deborah's lovely and talented daughter , whose life is thrown into turmoil by the Nazi occupation , she is a rare survivor.
Alexander Brandel : a narrator and leader of the Bathyran Zionist Movement in Warsaw
Wolf Brandel : Rachael ` sweetheart and a natural leader ,together with Rachael and her younger brother Stephan ., one of the young people of the ghetto determined to survive .
This book can be appreciated on many levels. It is a novel of love and hate , of destruction and redemption , of much that is tragic and horrific as well triumph of the human spirit . It is an intense human drama.
But most of all it contains an important lesson for the past and present , a lesson more important today than ever.
Fundamentally this is a story of the Jewish people, and about the hatred the Jewish people have survived at a time when the dark and hideous forces of anti-Semitism are reemerging on a scale unknown since Hitler's Third Reich, under the guise of anti-Zionism or hatred of Israel.
This is a story about how the Jewish people where persecuted and massacred at will in every land in which they where strangers, because they did where deprived of a homeland of their own .
Always at the darkest hours of the holocaust the one redeeming factor is the desire for the rebirth of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.
Indeed the movement that keeps the Jewish people alive is Zionism!
The same dream that many evil forces today are working to destroy.
When the Jewish children are being taken to their deaths in the Nazi vehicles, what keeps them alive a little longer is the dream living in the tiny land of Israel, then known by the colonial name of Palestine.
It is this dream that provides the only hope at all when we read of a rachitic three year old girl in filthy rags being shot dead by a Nazi officer, as she desperately ties to retrieve her torn baby doll from under his boot.
Another lesson of the book is the gross indifference to the world of the genocide of Jews. Is this really any different +to the equanimity of the world to the mass killing of Jews today by Palestinian terrorists in Israel , on an almost daily basis ? In a sense there is an even greater perversion by the world today, as most of the world, often led by those considered the most `progressive, shrilly condemn Israel and Jews for defending themselves. Condemn the Jewish people for wanting to survive, for the chance of succeeding where the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto failed.
Take these lines:
`Jews where charred into unrecognizable smoldering corpses.
Jews where roasted in bunkers, which where turned into coffins by wind shifts and downdrafts.
Jews where choked to death in clouds of smoke which crushed their lungs.'
Is this any different to what is going on today every day in Israel, with the bombing of Jews by Arabs .
The German officer Horst Von Epp , warns the Nazi's of the consequences of their holocaust , the disaster that will be brought upon them , and about the mark of shame that will stain their memory.
The same warning must be made to those who are acting against Israel and the Jews today.
Fictional account. - Rated 
'Appalled by standard of writing'?........please review ones' own ability.
Mila 18 does not pretend to be any more than it is, and is nowhere near as pretentious as some of the reviews.As a novel.........i.e. a fictionalised account........it does a good job and at no stage does Uris pretend to be writing a serious work on history.For the un-ostriches out there..........this is a good novel that is worth a read,but do not take it seriously.
A trashy page-turner masquerading as a 'historical' novel. - Rated 
...I read it out of curiosity as I'm living in Warsaw at the moment - where the action of the book takes place, and I guess I would not normally be a member of Uris' target readership. Firstly, I was appalled by the standard of writing. How can someone with so little ability in the English language be such a successful author? And how can he possibly do justice to an event of such desolate tragedy? Any glance at true accounts of what it was actually like to be there will instantly deflate the bogus romantic heroics of Mila 18 - I would urge people to read Hanna Krall's conversations with Marek Edelman (To Outwit God - Southwestern Univ. Press) the last surviving leader of the Ghetto Uprising. Or Wladyslaw Szpilman's remarkable account of life in the ghetto (The Pianist - soon to be released in Polanski's film adaption). His regard for local and historical verisimilitude is sloppy to say the least. His treatment of Polish names, for instance, is completely inconsistent - people are given vaguely Angllicised or Russian variants of names, so Andrei instead of Andrzej, Alex instead of Olek - I suppose this might be considered a bar to people forming relationships with a character, but it also removes any uniquely Polish-Jewishness from the characters. The names of streets are usually retained in something like their original Polish form, though of course 'v's are substituted for 'w's and all the specific Polish accents are removed to render the words completely meaningless. From this (admittedly pedantic!) standpoint, even the title is spelt wrong - there should be a bar through the 'l' (pronounced something like 'meewa', it ironically translates as 'nice'). The previously mentioned review also picks up on the horrible 1950s (even later I would say) Americanese that absolutely every character speaks - which deprives them of any distinctness from one another. Just what language is Christopher de Monti supposed to be speaking to these Polish and Polish/Jewish characters? Yiddish? Polish? Do they all miraculously speak English? Of course he really brings the Germans to life in an astonishing manner - with their 'Achtung!' and their 'Schnell'.. The Polish characters are of course painted in the most one-dimensional manner - stupid, cowardly and anti-semitic to a man. In spite of the way in which the Home Army is depicted by Uris, they did in fact provide some arms for the ZOB in the ghetto - certainly they did to little and too late but they can't all have been the distainful playboy aristocrats and idiot peasants that he depicts. And why the need to place this cast of completely fictional characters centre-stage, and not the real-life protagonists on whom they are lazily based, Czerniaków, Anielewicz, Edelman, Stroop et al? And a note in response to the young reader who takes the opportunity to trot out the familiar business of the Poles not giving a damn about the memory of the Jews of Warsaw. I would be the last to deny that anti-semitism still exists in Poland (though these days, though despicable and shameful, it's generally born of ignorance and unthinking habits of speech rather than actual experience of real breathing Jewish people), but Jewish people are still wont to dismiss Polish suffering in the war, and to forget the many Poles who risked the deaths of themselves and their families to help Jews (as recorded in Yad Vashem). Also, even with the best of intentions, there comes a point when people have to get on with trying to live their own lives - you can't expect young Poles in Warsaw with often an astonishingly sketchy knowledge even of the years of communism, to be concerned daily with the tragic events of almost 60 years ago. No, I shan't be reading any more Uris either.
Explosive red Ferraris - Rated 
The many Leon Uris fans out there will be upset to read an unenthusiastic review of this book, but I hope my reasons for redressing the balance will be clear. The novel exists on two main levels: as a history of real events and as a piece of fiction. In my view it doesn't succeed on either count. If Uris really engaged in lengthy research before writing Mila 18, as he states on the title page, he had a pool of valuable information to draw on for a detailed descriptive account of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw and more particularly of its inspirational final days. He gives place and street names in detail, with a clear textual description of the layout of the ghetto and reference both to its administration and security forces and to the German controlling authorities. So far so good, and there is no reason to doubt his accuracy. But why then invent so many key characters both in the ghetto and outside? If there was a real-life Andrei or Simon in charge of the Jewish fighting forces, why not give that person's real name and let his historical actions speak for themselves? There must have been a real person in the role of Alexander Brandel, Paul Bronski, Franz Koenig and so on. So why subsume their identities into fictional characters? The end effect is to detract not only from these characters' historicity but from the persuasive power of the genuinely historical events portrayed. The book retreats into fiction - how is the reader to tell which facts, figures and names are authentic, since the salient details of the account are so closely bound up with characters who did not actually exist? So near to the events of 1939-1943, this is an inexcusable approach. For historical accuracy, then, do not rely on Mila 18, but turn instead to an undramatised account such as Israel Gutman's "Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising". So what? It's a novel isn't it? Well yes, but not even a good novel. A good historical novel, firstly, does not falsify the names of leading characters - its fictional heroes are peripheral to the main events of history, viewing them from a particular perspective and not dictating how they turn out. And good novels are generally better constructed and less trite and cliché-ridden than Mila 18. It was written to be a fictional bestseller and therefore starts with a sex scene. Ho-hum. The main fighting characters are drop-dead handsome and almost entirely without moral blemish, and perfect lovers to boot. The leading women are beautiful, courageous, thoroughly resourceful and true to their menfolk. Only minor characters die early on. With one exception (the hedonistic Horst von Epp), the Germans are vile slimy scrofulous people who get their come-uppance. All in all, characterisation is two-dimensional and entirely predictable. The writing style might be termed explosive. Exclamation marks, repetition and non-sentences abound. This approach goes some way to making up for Uris' inability, despite the material at his disposal, to write a moderately interesting descriptive passage. A stark, heart-rending portrayal of what it must have been like to lie in the gutters with thousands of others dying of famine and disease - the smells, the sights and sounds in all their richness and horror? You won't find it here. For one thing. the Andrei Androfskis of this world (and we're really only interested in them and their love lives) are able to shrug off hunger and discomfort and never succumb to illness. So instead of description, how about a few stylistically-challenged explosions of lexemes? This is reasonably effective because readers have imagination and can fill in the blanks for themselves, but it is hardly great prose and I defy any ten-year-old not to be able to churn out the same sort of stuff. To move on to those bugbears of authors writing about foreign countries of which they have little or no experience: historical accuracy, anachronisms and accuracy of the spoken language. The first area I have dealt with in broad terms above, and others writing here have done the same. Beyond considerations of the authenticity of events portrayed during the time period of the novel, various examples of extreme laxness rear their ugly heads. Just one concerns the Italian nobleman, father of journalist Chris de Monti, who would "barrel" around his native land in a red Ferrari at 120 miles an hour - in the year 1910 or so. I think not, on several counts. And couldn't this sort of pratfall cast doubt on other unverifiable details of Uris' historical portrayal? Chris de Monti, one soon realises, is the central figure in the book. Not because he is terrific in bed or because he is a token "good" Christian whose presence will guarantee that non-Jews too will buy the book, but because he speaks American English. What this means for Uris is that de Monti speaks fluent 1950s Americanese, which is acceptable I suppose. At a pinch it is also acceptable that everyone speaking with de Monti (Polish or German) uses the same language and register. Unfortunately, Uris is too lazy to attempt to vary the vernacular when the Poles talk to one another, and certain American slang expressions sit very uneasily on the tongues of characters whose knowledge of the USA is probably limited to Lucky Strike and Charlie Chaplin. So zero for period feel and geographical accuracy. To judge by the overall flavour of reviews here, I am missing a great deal in Uris. Then again, the negative reviews of his latest book, "A God in Ruins" might support my viewpoint, since they echo my feelings about "Mila 18". As a historical author, he cannot compare with a serious student of the events of the Warsaw ghetto. As a fictional writer he doesn't quite stink, for there is a certain compulsiveness about this book which owes a good deal to its superficiality, but I for one won't be bothering with "Exodus" or "Trinity".
Much, much more than a novel of wartime struggle - Rated
Mila 18 was one of the best novels I have ever read. As common as this phrase may sound, this novel is anything but uncommon. Trying to reach an audience that has little, if any, knowledge of the actual non-fiction events that led to the destruction of the Jewery of Warsaw, Poland is a monumental task within itself. As for someone who has read a considerable amount on the actual events that led to the uprising of the Jews of Warsaw, this work of fiction symbolizes the sheer humanity and will to live that every fighter posessed in a wonderful, historical manner. On a recent trip to Poland I found myself searching for the places Uris described so often in his book, only to be confronted with the disdain of many Warsaw Poles who wish to bury the existence of nearly 300,000 Jewish inhabitants (pre-war estimate) and shy away from the memory of the largest European Jewish community's destruction. The strangest thing about Poland is that children, when trying to insult one another, or adults, wishing to claim one soccer team's dominance over another's, use the word "Jew" to signify cowardice. Mila 18 is one work of fiction that should be read by the people of Poland as well as those in the United States in order to see the significance of struggle and to understand who the real cowards are. Finally, as an important side note, once you pick up this novel, the thought of putting it down will not occurr to the reader until the last page is turned. It was; it is an excellent work of historical fiction that is a must read.
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