On burning ground : a son's memoir

"For as long as I can remember, I have been the confidant of a man's conscience..." begins this memoir, in which a son recounts how his Jewish-Polish father had to disguise himself as a Christian and join the Nazi SS to save his own life.

Weaving philosophical logic throughout his father's horrific wartime story, Skakun tells a personal, yet epic, account of war and bloodshed, of unspeakable cruelty and unnameable crimes.Nearly 60 years later, Michael Skakun returns to the scene of these crimes, analyzing the complicated relationship between the abuser and the abused, and the irreparable damage born of filial exposure to the most savage human brutality.

This is the story of the legacy of post-Holocaust Jews and the attempt to transcend the inheritance of suffering.