In Her Dad's Footsteps; Uncovering the wartime Joe.

Byline: Andrew Nagorski

He was a man without a past and I failed to notice," British writer Annette Kobak notes in "Joe's War: My Father Decoded" (444 pages. Alfred A. Knopf ). As the subtitle suggests, her book--part biography, part memoir, part history--chronicles her effort to trace her father's origins and his odyssey during World War II. A war baby of a British mother and a Polish father, Kobak knew only that her parents had met in London, when her mother was in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and her father was in the Polish Army under British command.

Jozef, or Joe, didn't discuss his past, and neither his daughter nor his wife ever asked. It was only as a grown woman that Kobak learned that her father was born in a Slovak village of Polish parents, who moved across the border to Poland when Joe was 13. She got her father to break his silence by traveling to Australia, where her parents had moved after she started her own family. In a series of interviews, Kobak learned about his wartime journey, beginning in Lwow, then in eastern Poland, after Hitler's armies attacked Poland from the west and Stalin's armies invaded from the east. At 19, Joe managed to escape capture by the Russians, return to his village in the Carpathian Mountains under German occupation, elude the Gestapo and lead escapees across the border to Slovakia. He kept going south and west, joining Polish Army units in France that were evacuated to Britain after that country fell.

In the most evocative part of the book, Kobak retraces the early part of her father's 1939 journey. As she struggles across mountain paths to villages haunted by brutal memories, she tries to imagine what her father felt as well as ...