The Fighter (review)

After growing up pummeled and penniless in Poland, Moshe Wisniak immigrates to Paris in the 1930s, where he marries, has a child, and makes a name for himself as an amateur boxer. Then war breaks out, and the Nazis arrest Moshe—along with thousands of other Jews living in France—and take him to Auschwitz, where he endures brutal working conditions, starvation, and the capricious cruelty of the soldiers. When the Nazis discover Moshe can box, they pit him for their entertainment against a dying comrade; unwilling to kill a fellow prisoner but anxious to live, Moshe must find a way to appease his captors without becoming a murderer himself. Drawn on real Holocaust accounts, this French import pulls no punches in terms of vivid, often excruciating details, from the casual brutality of the soldiers, to the stupefying horror of the gas chambers, including the poisoned stacks of bodies that some prisoners were forced to remove and bury. Though this is an adult-focused story, the heroism of Moshe and the many compellingly rendered scenes will have undeniable appeal for young adults; unfortunately, the often plodding pace and the meandering narrative arc make the story at times tough going, and the final third of the book, when Moshe toils alongside Polish prisoners in the coal mines, reads like an extended footnote to the boxing plot that dominates the center of the story. Patient readers, however, will be rewarded with an absorbing tale of Holocaust resistance, as the many layers of meaning in "fighter" are eventually revealed. An afterword with additional historical and biographical information is appended.