Portraits of a Soldier: The Extraordinary Life of Jon Lippens

At age thirteen, most boys are finding trouble in all its infinite forms. In 1939, thirteen-year-old Jon Lippens’s worst troubles found him in a predawn Nazi invasion that left his hometown of Ghent, Belgium, enveloped in mass death and destruction. His childhood ended that day.

Jon’s life thereafter was a series of traumatic events and close scrapes with death. He resisted Hitler Youth recruiters and avoided being sent to death in a labor camp, disappearing into the Belgian Underground Res...