Caroline Moorehead
Fire In the Blood
The life of Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942
By Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt (Translated by Euan Cameron)
Chatto & Windus 466pp £25 order from our bookshop
The sixth transport of French Jews bound for the Nazi death camps of occupied Poland left France on 17 July 1942. On board were craftsmen, jewellers, cabinet-makers, tanners and 200 people from Dijon. Among them was a 39-year-old novelist, Irène Némirovsky, born in Kiev and driven into exile in France by the Russian Revolution. Within six weeks she was dead of the typhus epidemic that swept through Auschwitz that summer.
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