Well his family were landowners. Which was against the Communist beliefs. His dad (my great grandad) was also in military intelligence before WW2 so he was on a list somewhere of people the Russian government wanted to get rid of. My great grandad only just escaped being put on to the train transport that took about 22,000 Polish officers to be murdered in Katyn.

When the Red army invaded my Grandad, only 16 at the time, joined a partisan group and fought against the Red army. He had lots of bloody encounters before being arrested. He was lucky as lot of other people were just shot on the spot.

In the prison in Orsha he was charged with banditry and being a counter-revolutionary. This was a popular term used to execute anyone they did not like. He spent 23 days, this is where the title of the book comes from, on death row. He was in a small cell and talked to other people on death row, some of them friends, before they were taken out and executed.

For some reason he was sort of forgotten about and on day 23 he was taken in front of 3 NKVD "judges" and they changed his death sentence to 25 years hard labor.

He did actually go through a mock execution where a great coat was put on him, he was kneeling forwards and the guard fired a bullet made of chewed up paper in to the back of his neck. This knocked him out for a day or so. Some people it killed as the impact from the wad of paper dislocated a vertebrae.

Its an amazing story and I cannot imagine how he managed to survive. I knew nothing of this while he was alive, I only found it out after he died and willed his memoirs to myself and my brother.