BOOK REVIEW: QUIET HERO: SECRETS FROM MY FATHER’S PAST BY RITA COSBY
A Book Review By DICK MORRIS of Quiet Hero: Secrets From My Father’s Past By Rita Cosby
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 is justifiably the stuff of numerous books, articles, and films. But, just as significant and lasting in its impact was the Polish Resistance Revolt of 1944.
In one of the most galling stories of perfidy and trickery, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin summoned the Polish resistance to come out of hiding and rise to fight the German war machine, promising immediate aid from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops massed on the other side of the Vistula River gazing down on the city of Warsaw. The resistance emerged from their underground hiding spots and fiercely attacked the Wehrmacht inflicting large casualties on the German occupiers. But the Soviet troops sat there on the opposite bank of the Vistula for five months and did not budge to assist them. Almost one million Poles were slaughtered as the Nazis destroyed their units. Once the smoke of battle had cleared, the Soviets crossed the river and pushed the Nazis back on their drive to Berlin. Stalin had succeeded in getting Hitler to wipe out the only forces of democracy and freedom in Poland.
Now Rita Cosby, award-winning television host and a valued former colleague of mine at Fox News, has written a touching and moving memoir devoted to her father’s experience fighting the Germans and his trek to freedom in its aftermath.
Her book interested me as an historic work and I wanted to read it because of the light it shed on this little known incident in world history. The Ghetto uprising – an epic story of resistance to genocide unequaled in world history — is so much better known, but the 1944 Resistance Revolt had a large strategic significance. Poland, with 40 million people, is as large as all the other states of the Soviet Eastern European empire combined (Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria) except for Yugoslavia. Subduing Poland’s activists and wiping out its capacity for resistance was the key to establishing the Soviet Empire behind the Iron Curtain.
But, as I read Quiet Hero, it emerged as a loving, moving story of a father-daughter relationship in which the values of freedom and liberty were passed along with some pretty sensational DNA.
All true lovers of freedom need to read Quiet Hero to be reminded both of the depths of human perfidy and the heights of human striving and love, side by side against a magnificent panoply of history.
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