Turncoat

In the summer of 1945, with the war nearly over, Walter Proska is sent to a small detachment charged with guarding a railway line in a remote forest on the border between Ukraine and Byelorussia. The region is swampy and sweltering, and the men are plagued by mosquitoes. Abandoned by their own army as local resistance grows, they must still carry out the increasingly senseless and brutal commands of their superior officer.

As the weeks pass, the soldiers withdraw into themselves, sliding toward despair and a longing for death. A meeting with Wanda, a young Polish partisan, pushes Proska to question whether the oath he swore still binds him. He wrestles with the questions that consume him: when conscience and duty collide, which should prevail? Can anyone act without incurring some guilt? And why can he not put this woman of the resistance out of his mind?

Lenz wrote the novel in 1951 as his second book. His publisher turned it down, judging that a story about a German soldier who switches sides to the Soviets would not be welcome during the Cold War. The manuscript lay forgotten for almost seventy years until it surfaced after the author's death in 2014. Lenz, a German writer, is best known for The German Lesson.