During mass at Saint Stanislaw Kosta Church, in Zoliborz, Poland, a boy now best known locally for his work with the Windy Hill foundation, pointed a pistol at the church organist and made him play his country's national anthem.

The organist, though he could not admit it at the time, was both terrified and delighted. Most, if not all the congregation sang, even though they risked their lives doing so. The boy, not yet 16-years-old at the time, was Julian E. Kulski, architect, author, critic and friend of Middleburg.

In May of 1944, in Nazi-occupied Poland, the penalty for those who sang the anthem was death, and Kulski, and an extraordinary group of men, women and children made trouble for the Germans in Warsaw almost from the very beginning.

Many were killed.

Kulski himself was captured, imprisoned, and tortured, but survived to tell their extraordinary stories in a new memoir, accompanied by an equally compelling CD. Kulski's Legacy of the White Eagle describes his experiences from the first days of the invasion to liberation from a POW camp at war's end. He witnessed the early Blitz and the German occupation. Denied admission to school he became a fireman at 14 and a dedicated, and deadly, resistance fighter.

His stories, and those told on the accompanying CD by those who survived with and beside him, are remarkable, describing from an teen-age partisan's perspective, day-to-day acts of resistance and defiance, the creation and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the tragic Warsaw uprising of 1944.

The new memoir, the CD, and if you can find a copy of his diaries, Dying We Live, first published in English in 1979, are treasures, readable and truly worthy of a reading.

Legacy of the White Eagle (Middleburg: HMP Press, 2006). $24.95. Order it from the "online shop" on the National History Day web site: http://www.nationalhistoryday.org/.