WHITE, William L. : The captives of Korea (fülszöveg)
THIS startling tale, so impressively documented, gains its absorbing narrative power from the intertwining of three themes.
The story of what happened to our prisoners is told by the boys themselves. Most readers, who have not known that 58% of our Ameriean army prisoners will never return from Communist captivity, will be both appalled and fascinated by this poignant final account of just how and why more than half of them died.
Balancing this, is a running chronicle of the tragi-comic strivings of the International Red Cross to get for these dying American teen-agers the food and drugs which would have saved them – ever imploring the Communists (disdainful in the flush of their initial victories) to do more than pay lip service to the Geneva Convention for the Protection of Prisoners of War. An otherwise sober Red Cross statistic on the diet of prisoners becomes, in this setting, as exciting as a dropped clue in a detective story.
Now that all can at last be told, there are intriguing shifts in viewpoint. "Brainwashing" – once viewed in the West with indignation and alarm-becomes the droll stuff of comedy as we watch the rigid Stalinist mind blunder clumsily into a booby-trap of its own contriving.
Early a third theme enters: the surprising tale of how our good treatment of the Communist prisoners held by the United Nations revived, in our own barbed-wire compounds, Asia's bitter Civil War – to the bewildered embarrassment of American Camp Commanders!
From its arresting beginnings, the story moves upward in steady crescendo to high triumph for the United Nations and the Free World. In the end, while Communism's "starvation-indoctrination" method won 21 confused Americans to their cause, 88,000 of their prisoners held by us (it was more than half) uproariously rebelled against return to their Communist home lands.
So this is far more than a book for those American homes which have been touched by the tragedy of Korea. Here is no shrill screaming of the eagle: occasional blunders of Americans or our Allies are never glossed over. And because the tale is told often with the spark of wit but always with sustained detachment, these qualities should win for it that important overseas audience which this deeply moving chapter of world history so richly deserves.
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| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
