Preview of Petros' War Summary:

Petros' War, according to Joan Nist, is "a novel which portrays both the indiscriminate atrocities spawned by war and the individual heroism performed by ordinary people."

For ten-year-old Petros, the day World War II began seemed to him like a festival.

Petros—with images in his mind from his many books of heroes and their deeds—decided this would be his heroic war filled with deeds of valor about which he could tell his own children. His work for the Resistance, however, did not require much heroism as he had imagined it, and liberating a dog from a German soldier and secretly painting slogans on walls did not seem dramatic. In time, however, brutality, loss of freedom, famine, depression and the death of his friends mature him and convince him that survival is the greatest heroic deed of all.