Book excerpt: At 25, Jacob Marateck was a Jewish officer in the notoriously anti-Semitic Russian army during the Russo-Japanese War. After avoiding a firing squad for a third time, he escaped from a Siberian forced labor camp with Warsaw's colorful "King of Thieves." This is the remarkable, true story of an ordinary man made extraordinary by participating in the history-making events of the 1900s in Russia and Poland.