Synopsis
Stewart Dubinsky knew his father had served in World War II. And he'd been told how David Dubin (as his father had Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed) had rescued Stewart's mother from the horror of the Balingen concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his father's death, a packet of wartime letters to a former fiancée, and learns of his father's court-martial and imprisonment, he is plunged into the mystery of his family's secret history and driven to uncover the truth about this enigmatic, distant man who'd always refused to talk about his war.
As he pieces together his father's past through military archives, letters, and, finally, notes from a memoir his father wrote while in prison, secretly preserved by the officer who defended him, Stewart starts to assemble a dramatic and baffling chain of events.
The New York Times - Janet Maslin
… Ordinary Heroes works best through vivid, anecdotal descriptions: authentic-sounding stories of foxhole ordeals, battlefield casualties and a particularly terrifying parachute drop. Even when expressed stiltedly ("and tears still would not come, leaving me in a state of constipated agitation"), these memories have immediacy. The author's anguish about war is unmistakably real.