The Outrage

Misha Kopiec, a Jewish officer in the Polish Army, was on the German border the day the Nazi invasion began. What followed was a six-year fight for survival that took him across the shifting front lines of the Eastern War, first as a Polish officer, then, after capture and escape, running arms to the Polish resistance, before concealing his identity to re-enlist in the Soviet Army under a false background, at a time Stalin had ordered Polish officers executed.

Recruited into Soviet Military Intelligence for his fluency in Polish, German, and Russian, Misha operated disguised behind enemy lines, leading a covert mission that brought his unit to Babi Yar one day after the massacre of Kiev's Jews, the moment he understood the Nazis' intent was not occupation, but annihilation. Captured a second time, he engineered another escape and walked 1,000 kilometers alone through Nazi-held territory in the depths of the Russian winter, racing to reach his family before the genocide could.

The Outrage is not a Holocaust memoir. It is a truthful, firsthand eyewitness account and military history of World War II on the Eastern Front, verified against the historical record and preserved in Misha's own testimony, archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Holocaust is never far from these pages, but the men and women in them are, first and foremost, soldiers, resisters, and survivors fighting to live and to save the people they loved.

Misha never lost his faith in God, but he never accepted easy comfort from it either. Decades later, when asked directly whether he believed God had saved him, his answer was not comfort, it was a question in return: "Are you saying He didn't?"