Rogala in the Crimean War

Companion to The Orphan's Triumph

In 1850s Poland-partitioned and oppressed-22-year-old Michael Rogala, a brilliant Sorbonne-educated idealist, dreams of Polish independence. His heart lies in education, his spirit in resistance. Torn between staying home to teach Polish children their language and history, or joining the fight against Russian imperialism, he eventually enlists in the Sultan Cossacks, a ragtag legion of Poles, Ukrainians, and others under Ottoman command. With him go five local recruits-into the chaos of the Crimean War.

At the same time, thirteen-year-old Val Karnowski, Rogala's brilliant but sensitive protégé, struggles with loss, identity, and a brutal Prussian-run school system determined to stamp out Polish culture. Thru a moving exchange of letters, Michael teaches Val about the world-its architecture, politics, and ideals-while Val responds with his own intimate reflections on growing up from a boy into a man under occupation.

Their bond spans distance and danger, threading thru military training, battlefield action, and the small victories of simple village life. Historical events-from the Charge of the Light Brigade to Florence Nightingale's nursing efforts-are seamlessly woven with fictionalized accounts of Polish volunteers who believed that war might bring national resurrection.

You'll travel from the quiet farmlands around Lasin to the Crimean front-Inkerman, Eupatoria, Balaklava, and the siege of Sebastopol. You'll witness the clash of empires, the mingling of Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims, and the forgotten efforts of exiles like Adam Mickiewicz to mobilize a Jewish army for freedom.

This is a novel of friendship, idealism, survival, and the aching hope for national rebirth. Told thru gripping prose and deeply human moments, Rogala in the Crimean War is both an enlightening journey through 19th-century Europe and an emotionally compelling story of two lives forever changed by war.

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Gerald was born in 1937 in Chicago. As a child he was an avid reader of How to Draw books. One day at age 11 he wandered over to the Grown-up Books section of the public library and pulled down a picture-book of gothic cathedrals. He fell in love with their beauty. His mother used to give him the white paper in which the butcher had wrapped meat. Finding a large piece of plywood, he became "the only kid on his block" who used to sketch up gothic cathedral façades. He began studying Architecture in 1955 and worked his way thru college, earning a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Illinois in 1966. He is proud to say that he never took a penny of student loans. He received an Illinois license in 1972. Sometime after that he began conducting genealogical research on his ancestors. He speaks Polish, German, and Spanish to some extent. He has a gift for language.
Gerald has undergone three intensifications of faith in his life: one at age fourteen, when, as a child prodigy he became the object of three years of abuse by his classmates. He endured and graduated. The second was at age twenty-two, when it appeared he was about to die. He told himself, "If I'm gonna die, I'm gonna go out in a blaze of glory", and joined volunteer groups that kept him active every night of the week. The third was in 1982, when a concurrence of events, including the loss of a job, left him "down and out", and God gave him a new image of Himself as a very loving Father.
After this last intensification in 1982 began to feel the call to do something more directly to promote Jesus' kingdom on earth. He began to explore religious life. It saddened him to see the majority of adult Catholics coasting thru life on a few simplistic ideas that they picked up in early life. In 1992 he sold a condo in Chicago and used the money from the sale for education. He entered Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio in September, 1992. Once there he responded to a call by Fr. Michael Scanlon TOR and entered Holy Apostles Seminary for older men in Cromwell, CT. in fall, 1993. He spent 3 months doing door-to-door evangelization in Ceres and Modesto, CA in summer, 1994 while on assignment at St. Jude's parish, Ceres. He concluded that religious life was not for him and returned to Franciscan U. and earned a Master of Arts degree in Theology and Christian Ministry in 1996.
Unable to find work with his degree, and running out of money, he found a job as an archit...