Pierre -Louis Basse's novel is based on one of the most remarkable sports stories in history, that of the Ukrainian football team’s unrelenting honor and sportsmanship.

In 1941, the Nazis organized a European football tournament in order to assert the superiority of the Third Reich. But nobody told Ukraine’s FC Start that. This football team was cobbled together by a former baker from Kiev who recruited both older and younger players lacking the chance to compete.

For more than one year, the unassuming Ukrainian team handily defeated all of its opponents. And so word spread around all of Europe that this team of poor wretches — many of them Jewish to boot — defied Nazi Germany.

August 9, 1942. FC Start competed against the Nzazi team in a rematch at Zenit stadium in Kiev. The Germans lost 2-7 in the first game and a similar outcome was unthinkable. The German government made it clear to the Ukrainian players that they would face death if they did not throw the match.

But the men of FC Start, even when threatened by armed Nazi officers in the locker room, would not concede. They defeated the Nazi team 5-3 and made an entire nation proud.

But their victory was short-lived as the Nazis live up to their promised threat. Every player was arrested, tortured and deported to a concentration camp where most of them were killed.