Prisoners

In this remarkable first novel, we meet Technical Sergeant "Sandy" Delman, a young Jewish-American soldier assigned to guard captured Nazi soldiers in a POW camp in rural France. When Delman, a celebrated high school football star, enlists in the Army to fight Germans, he never expects that his poor vision will sentence him to an assignment at a POW camp. When Delman reacts violently to racial slurs aimed at him by several POWs, he loses his stripes and is consigned to work under a hostile supply sergeant. And thus begins Delman's punishment and his quest to escape the confines of the POW camp. As more and more captured Germans pour into the camp, provisions begin to run out. The POWs fear a plot to starve them to death. When his commanding officer, Colonel Nelson, fails to obtain supplies, Delman approaches him with a risky plan to lead a convoy of trucks, driven by POWs, to bring supplies back from nearby depots. Suddenly, Delman finds himself the unlikely leader of an expedition on which hangs the survival of hundreds of German POWs, and the fate of Colonel Nelson's career. When the perilous journey across the French countryside becomes even more dangerous, Delman finds his own survival is at risk.