MILA 18: Historical Fiction

Title: Mila 18
Author: Leon Uris
Genre: Historical Fiction

Mila 18 is one of Leon Uris’s lesser-known novels, albeit largely because Paul Newman did not star in its movie adaptation, as he did Uris’s Exodus. In either case, Mila 18 may be classified as a work from the genre of historical fiction; that is, fictional characters are placed amid historically accurate settings. Mila 18 is the story of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the revolt of the ghetto inhabitants against the brutal Nazi regime, in a failed effort to evade deportation to the death camps. As Uris establishes in the novel’s forward, “the places and events described actually happened. The characters are fictitious”- hence my assessment of this book as historical fiction. The tale is fraught with drama, romance, action and overwhelming tragedy, which is altogether intensified by the understanding that the circumstances are true.

Interestingly, Leon Uris’s chosen historical setting is not merely a backdrop for the narrative of the characters. Rather, the characters drive and determine the action, playing a role in the historical outcome. To site one example, Andrei Androski is a Jewish Polish army officer central to the narrative, in fact leading the uprising in the ghetto. Mila 18’s characters create the historical situation for the reader. The readers follows ordinary characters and through them experiences peaceful Poland invaded by the Nazis, brutality, isolation into the ghetto, starvation and desperation that goads them to revolt.

The Warsaw ghetto forty-day uprising against the Nazis, persistent against all odds, is the narrative’s climax. Failure was fated. But, in one last fictitious maneuver, (pitying either his readers or characters) Uris delivers more survivors from the ghetto in his narrative, than actually, historically, escaped the Warsaw ghetto.