By any standards, Waldemar Latnik's experience of the Second World War was remarkable. Fighting in the Polish Resistance, his unit was engaged in a bitter ethnic conflict with pro-Nazi Ukrainians. Unknown in the West, this struggle was, like that raging at the same time between the Serbs and Croats, provoked by the Nazis arming one ethnic group and unleashing it against a rival. Lotnik describes his part in a war of terror and counter-terror which claimed at least half a million lives with total and sometimes frightening candour.<BR>Nine Lives offers a brutally frank account of ethnic warfare which has striking parallels with recent conflicts in the Balkans and also describes a major 'sideshow' to the Second World War which is virtually unknown outside Eastern Europe.