The last summer before the end of World War II, Walter Proska is posted to a small unit tasked with ensuring the safety of a railway line deep in the forest on the border with Ukraine and Byelorussia. An encounter with a young Polish partisan, Wanda, makes Proska further doubt the validity of his oath of allegiance. Written in 1951, The Turncoat is Siegfried Lenz's second novel. Rejected by his publisher, who thought that the story would be unwelcome in the context of the Cold War, the manuscript was forgotten for nearly 70 years before being rediscovered after the author's death. A posthumous triumph.