Jerzy Andrzejewski's Ashes and Diamonds is a complete rip-off if you are in it for the diamonds. My copy only included the ashes part. After getting over the fact that I had been duped into buying all ashes and no diamonds, I began to enjoy the beauty of the ashes.
Andrzejewski does a spectacular job in presenting ashes. The ashes in this book are the remains of Poland after the Second World War. The Poles seek to pick up the pieces of their war- torn country and move on towards a "new Poland", one that embodies freedom and happiness. However the road to this promised land is very elusive, and people often blindly pick sides in a new battle to define Poland. The result is only more ashes.
The part of the book that really made it worth reading for me was its fresh look at the heart of mankind. In my opinion, Andrzejewski does not present a people who held on to morality and goodness through even the toughest of times. He presents a people who, when pressured, revealed the predominately black makeup of a human heart that allows a person to do evil in order to survive or merely to get ahead. Some characters deal with this blackness in themselves and in others, often feeling let down and confused. One example of this is in a conversation between Podgorski and Kossecki after the war is over. Kossecki is burdened after the war with the knowledge that, when in the camp, he did not behave as the honorable man he thought himself to be before the war. He took part in beating people to save his own hide. In their conversation, Kossecki looks for answers to make himself feel okay. Then Podgorski, speaking about the time before the war, says "People had confidence in themselves, in their courage and their morality. Certain things seemed impossible. Life then simply did not present such desperate alternatives. A man had a right to think of himself as decent and incapable of exceeding certain limits. Only criminals did so. But nowadays I've met so many people who broke down and failed this or that test that I don't attach much importance to what a man thinks of himself. Until a man faces the test he can deceive himself endlessly." Kossecki is disappointed in the blackness of his own heart and Podgorski is disappointed in others who let him down. Through some character's painful realization that people are often not as good as they would like to believe, I was forced to ask myself how I would react in such horrible circumstances. Would a terrible situation reveal diamonds or ashes in my own heart? I believe Andrzejewski's greatest success in Ashes and Diamonds is his ability to make me question myself, even though the novel is set in a foreign land and in a time period I will never live in.
However, in my opinion Andrzejewski does a poor job of developing the characters. There are just way too many of them to really know much at all about any of them (I counted 47). It is a pretty good sign that there are too many characters when you have to keep notes just to remember who the main characters are. It is possibly lacking in plot as well. Perhaps through predominately using dialogue and not action, Andrzejewski was attempting to offer a glimpse into the minds of the characters. If this is the case, he could have done a better job by limiting the number of characters and spending more time with each of them. It would seem that if a lot of dialogue was included at the expense of plot, we would at least know more about the characters. Unfortunately this is not the case.
Overall, I enjoyed Andrzejewski's beautiful presentation of ashes. However, if he intended to complement the ashes with diamonds, I missed it. From the young gang of boys, about whom it would be hard to conjure up anything good to say, to the older party leaders who seemed lost and were often driven by personal success rather than by a desire for a free and happy people, they all seemed ashier than a lotionless Arab on a cold day. If you open Ashes and Diamonds to find diamonds inside, perhaps you will have better chances looking in a box of crackerjacks.

There are many ways to get to grips with the complicated realities of the post-WW2 Eastern Europe but reading Ashes and Diamonds is arguably the best of them. Rather then reading some dry history book which would necessary have less feeling for the stories of individual people, Ashes and Diamonds tells history exactly by concentrating on the peculiar life stories of the main characters. It shows how the unsettled and chaotic situation of postwar Poland gave rise to some weird coalitions in politics, strange passions or totally unreasonable expectations of the people who had to live then. Since we can afford the luxury of informed hindsight and already know that by 1949 Poland became communist, it is interesting to watch Poland in the period when things were not at all clear yet.