Here is a novel that reads like a documentary, told on various levels through different personalities. It makes all other prison camp stories of World War II seem contrived and romanticized Moving in its quality of authenticity, there is a deep knowledge of a nucleus of prisoners through backflashes of their lives, told in the German camps where their most fundamental rights are ignored and where they exists somehow until Patton ""liberates"" them. The kind of story that needed years to ripen, this has a quality of greatness in concept and in unforgettable.