James White

Storylandia 27 James White

Private Johnny Zewiski stands above a polluted river, his hands tied behind his back. It's a cold afternoon in war-torn Warsaw, Poland. In front of him, beyond the river, smoldering ruins echo the sound of small arms fire. Behind him, a Nazi machine gun crew hastily assembles their weapon, anxious to finish the execution and get back to shelter. Ex-private, actually. Johnny had deserted his post and fled his Army unit under wartime circumstances, thereby sealing his fate, no matter who took the trouble to capture and put him front of a firing squad. He fled with honorable intentions, he thought, but the war didn't care about honor. His only friend, Jakub, another displaced Polish-American, stands next to him, kvetching about unrequited miracles. Johnny's journey, from his boyhood home in Allentown, Pennsylvania to Warsaw, is a crazy ride of miraculous encounters. It begins in Tunisia, then across the North Sea, through the heart of Nazi-occupied Poland, and winds up in the arms of the embattled Polish resistance who are desperately trying to defend their capital until the Allied armies can save them from the Nazi onslaught. He dreams of home while waiting for the bullets to fly; his mother and father who cried while their former homeland turned to rubble, his brothers who warned him not to go near the recruiting station and his girlfriend who followed him in his tortured dreams and begged him to come home. When the machine gun fires, Johnny's fate takes yet another turn and he begins a new journey that's just as dangerous and ill-conceived as the last. Published by WapshottPress.org