IN 1942, a football match took place between a Luftwaffe side and a team of Kiev residents from a local bakery.

FC Start consisted mainly of players from Dynamo Kiev. With much of the city's population starving, one man, Iosif Kordik, determined to save local footballers and athletes by offering them work in his bakery. The team was so successful that they won a series of fixtures with ease before the Luftwaffe game was arranged. It will come as no great revelation that the Nazi occupiers made it clear the 'home' side must lose or face the consequences.

The match became the subject of legend, as well as a victim of Soviet propaganda. In Dynamo, journalist Andy Dougan has uncovered the truth behind an extraordinary event during the Second World War.

He sets the match in its historical context, outlining the horrors of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa, as ill-prepared Soviet forces were slaughtered and Kiev fell to the Nazis. Dougan can offer no happy ending to the story of the match, it is no Escape To Victory.

There are fascinating grey areas, too. Kordik isn't a heroic Oskar Schindler figure. Rather, he is described as a 'small, humourless man', so determined not to offend the Nazis that he changed his name to hide his Moravian Czech origins. He just happened to have a passion for sport.

Dynamo is an uplifting book because the story of the team is one of astonishing unity and bravery in the face of oppression which, no matter how much you know of Nazi Germany, still beggars belief.