He has written about Christmas in time of war before now, and more than once. His recounting of the Christmas truce of 1914 is a testament to the goodness in the heart of man, even in the midst of war, where all bets, as they say, are off. Weintraub’s latest is A Christmas Far from Home: An Epic Tale of Courage and Survival during the Korean War.

Douglas MacArthur had told the troops they would be home for Christmas. That didn’t happen. And in the book, about a war he himself served in, Weintraub writes about China’s way of dealing with its prisoners of war.On Christmas Eve, their captors decorated their prison camp as an indoctrination technique. Brainwashing was well underway by the time the POWs were greeted with a Merry Christmas sign with a placard underneath it that read:

“If it were not for the Wall Street Imperialists you would be home with your families on this Christmas night.” You can only imagine what a man who fought at Normandy on D-Day and spent time as a POW in Germany suffered the time he rose on command, to declare adulation for his captors, and denounce the American military mission in Korea. The Chinese deliberately spread the “reeducated” around to other camps in the hopes that they in turn would spread “their anticipated contagion.”

A senior officer who had been ambushed and had surrendered explained to a lieutenant who was furious about “the turncoat behavior” that, “to save lives, he saw nothing wrong with ‘going along with the program to a certain extent.’” After all, he rationalized, what they would find themselves saying was merely “a parody of Communist ideology.”

Stories coming out of Iraq and Syria of Christians who will not stand down, who will not renounce their faith as the Islamic State threatens Christianity’s very existence there, remind us that martyrdom is not the stuff of history. An elderly woman with breast cancer named Ghazala comes to mind.

Earlier this year, she and a group of other sick or disabled Iraqi Christians defied tormenters and told them they’d rather die than surrender their faith. And while most of the choices and decisions we are faced with are not matters of life or death, many of them are about integrity and whether or not we really are who we claim and pray to be. You can’t celebrate Christmas authentically without keeping this in mind.