Jonathan Mirsky
Betrayed From Within and Without
A Garden of Eden in Hell: The Life of Alice Herz-Sommer
By Melissa Müller and Reinhard Piechocki
Macmillan 326pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
The Diary of Petr Ginz: 1941–1942
By Chava Pressburger (ed), (Translated by Elena Lappin)
Atlantic Books 192pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
A friend who was a child in Israel in the early Fifties told me that in his school the students were taught to honour Jewish heroes. Theirs was a long history, the teachers said, from Old Testament times to the present, including those who had died in the Warsaw ghetto uprising near the end of the Second World War. They were taught, also, to be embarrassed by the millions of Jews who had perished in the extermination camps, ‘like sheep’, without resisting. In his memoir, Of Blood and Hope (published thirty years ago), Samuel Pisar, who survived four camps, described how when the SS razed the ghetto in his birthplace, Bialystok, many young men and women did fight back. ‘Unarmed, their resistance was futile. They were mowed down.’ He concluded bleakly: ‘Acquiescence, surrender, assimilation, conversion – nothing would ever satisfy our executioners. Simply and indiscriminately, we had to be expunged – our blood was tainted.’
Alice Herz-Sommer, one of the 3,500 who survived Theresienstadt (the camp two hours from Prague from which 89,000 inmates were transported to ‘the east’ to be exterminated), made her way to Israel in 1949. She found in the new state an ‘uncomfortable black-and-white thinking … here were the new Israeli
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘He has become a kind of global guru, public intellectual and consultant to the great. He is the ultimate geopolitical gerontocrat.’
From July 2022: Piers Brendon on Henry Kissinger.
Piers Brendon - Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her
Piers Brendon: Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her - Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy by Henry Kissinger
literaryreview.co.uk
‘Even setting to one side the historically neuralgic relationship with ... Ireland, Britain’s insular periphery has from at least the time of the Romans presented difficulties for authorities wishing to centralise.’
Peter Marshall on Britain's islands.
Peter Marshall - Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago
Peter Marshall: Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago - The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia
literaryreview.co.uk
Offer ends soon! Take advantage of our best ever Black Friday offer and get a year's subscription for £29.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/blackfriday/