Irvin Faust was still a teenager in 1940, when the German invasion of France reshaped his personal universe. As he recalled years later in "Journey into War" (1995), "I experienced the worst culture shock of my young life. France fell in six weeks. The greatest army in the world, my heroes of 1914-1918, collapsed overnight." Most young men in their midteens do not take global crises personally, but Faust had been nourished in a household where history held a bitter legacy. His father, Morris, had left his native village near Kraków in Galicia to escape anti-Semitism at a time when that part of Poland was under the domination of the Austro-Hungarian emperor Francis Joseph I. As Faust wrote in 1995, "With or without the Emperor, the Polish were as bad as the Austrians, and the Austrians were even worse than the Germans--look at Hitler." Leaving behind his parents and...