Book Review #3 - "We Die Alone"

Okay - this was an AMAZING book! It was one of those books that you literally can't put down. I would grab it to unwind after a long day and I wouldn't put it down for like 4 or 5 chapters until I absolutley had to go to bed or actually accomplish something else.

I had started reading another book before. Its a book that I had been looking forward to reading it, but sometimes, you start a book and just aren't in THAT mood at THAT point and so you have to put it down and go elsewhere. I think I got through about 4 chapters on the other book and then decided to come back to it later so you'll have to stay tuned for that book review!

Anyways, this was a great true story. Again, a topic that I hadn't really thought of before, but I decided to branch out. Its a story about Norway during the WWII Nazi occupation. A group of Norwegians who had left before the war and were actually living in England and were in the military there had been sent on an expedition to sail to Norway from England in a fishing boat and infiltrate the land in order to find Norwegians who were against the Nazis and train them to fight and rebel.

Unfortunately, in the first two days of their landing, 7 of the men on the boat had been killed and one was barely alive and was on foot trying to escape the Germans who were hunting him down.

His story of escape is unbelievable. It includes him going snow blind, suffering frostbite, having to amputate 9 of his own toes, being left strapped to a sled in a snow cave for over a month and a half while fellow Norwegians tried to formulate a plan to help him escape and so many other events that you honestly can't believe this guy actually lived!

At the end, it was the Lapps that took him across the Norwegian border into Sweden. It was interesting to learn some facts about the Lapps and their culture, etc. There was an interesting line that resurrected some memories for me of some facts that I learned in Hungary. In Hungary? you say.... What does Hungary have to do with Lapland. I'm glad you asked! :) I'll quote a line from the book to explain.... "The Lappish language is said to have no relation to any other language in the world except Hungarian, and there are very few people except the Lapps who understand it." We've been told that the Hungarian language has ties to the Lapp language and I know that some of the Hungarians we work with, when they speak English, they have almost a Nordic accent to their English. I just found that pretty insteresting.

So - pick up a copy of "We Die Alone" by David Howarth. It has a forward by Stephen Ambrose who does a lot of WWII writing. In fact, the year I took dad and the aunts and mom to see the WWII dedication, we saw a one man play by Stephen Ambrose that they did at the theatre at Arlington National Cemetary. This book is definitely worth a read and its an easy read to boot!