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This is one of the most tragic and horrifying memoirs to emerge from the Second World War. At its centre is an episode so dreadful – and so firmly suppressed by the Communist authorities of Poland and the Soviet Union – that it has taken 50 years for a candid account to appear in English. This is the genocidal war fought between Ukrainian and Polish partisans in the borderlands either side of the River Bug, a merciless war of mutual extermination which cost tens of thousands of lives – almost all civilians – and which was routinely accompanied by massacre, rape and torture on a Rwandan or Bosnian scale.

Waldemar Lotnik was sucked into this bloodbath as a teenager. He fought as a Polish guerrilla against the Ukrainian bands, who were closely supported by the Nazi Wehrmacht. Half a century on, he has the courage to admit and describe his own share in the killings of prisoners and civilians, and the far worse atrocities committed by some of his own comrades. History will judge whether the Ukrainians behaved with even greater savagery, as Lotnik claims.

Because of the author’s fearless candour, Nine Lives is a unique witness to the terrifying moral and political chaos which fell on Poland as the war ended and Soviet troops replaced the Nazis. He was put into the Nazi death camp of Majdanek, which he only just survived. Emaciated but free, he was recruited into the new Communist armed forces of Poland and sent to Russia to train as a Soviet intelligence agent. Defecting, he joined the remnant of Poland’s non-Communist partisan army now fighting a hopeless guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation.

Finally, he decided to escape and, after many incredible adventures and brushes with death, reached the American zone of Germany.

This is an unforgettable book. Lotnik’s story is not comfortable reading, but it is essential: a missing fragment of the history of this barbarous continent.

Neal Ascherson