the Holocaust
Auschwitz-themed novels are cheapening the Holocaust
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has spawned a host of deathcamp dramas that trivialise the Jewish tragedy, says Tanya Gold
The agony of making music at Auschwitz
Anne Sebba explores the ethical questions that haunted members of the female orchestra obliged to play marching music to hurry fellow inmates to and from forced labour
The world is now inexorably divided – and the West must fight to survive
One side wants to preserve core Judeo-Christian values; the other, driven by Islamist extremists, seeks to establish a dangerous new world of deracinated individuals, says Melanie Phillips
The contagions of the modern world
Disturbing trends in American healthcare, higher education, opioid use and crime come under scrutiny in Malcolm Gladwell’s sequel to The Tipping Point
An outcast among outcasts: Katerina, by Aharon Appelfeld, reviewed
A peasant girl flees her abusive home, to find happiness working for Jewish families in the lush Carpathian countryside – until anti-Semitic pogroms change everything irrevocably
In search of kindred spirits: An Absence of Cousins, by Lore Segal, reviewed
When Ilka Weisz, a young refugee from Vienna, accepts a teaching post in smalltown Connecticut, she struggles to make friends in the close-knit academic community
Passports out of hell
Roger Moorhouse describes how various diplomats stationed in Europe risked their positions to issue as many forged ‘tickets to safety’ to Jews as possible
Travellers’ tales
In the absence of their own written records, they have been ‘invented’ and misrepresented in Europe ever since their arrival in the Middle Ages, says Klaus-Michael Bogdal
Across the wire at Belsen
Hannah Pick-Goslar, a survivor of the Holocaust and Anne’s friend in Amsterdam, movingly describes their snatched conversations in Belsen before Anne disappeared forever
Journeys out of hell
In a profoundly moving family memoir, Daniel Finkelstein describes the miracle by which his mother, as a child, was rescued from the hell of Belsen
An isolated misfit
Why did W.G. Sebald risk his reputation by telling such strange, repeated lies, wonders Lucasta Miller
The hot-headed youth who played straight into Hitler’s hands
On 7 November 1938, the 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German embassy in Paris. Claiming to have secret papers,…
The absurd struggle to claim ownership of Kafka
Benjamin Balint’s Kafka’s Last Trial is a legal and philosophical black comedy of the first water, complete, like all the…
Laws that changed the world
Prosecution for genocide or crimes against humanity is now a given in international law. But before the Nuremberg Trials, these two groundbreaking notions didn’t exist. Daniel Hahn describes their origins and inspiration
No end to the Final Solution
David Cesarani, Research Professor of History at Royal Holloway University of London, died at the age of 58 on 25…
The continent in crisis
Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and…
‘It’s always wrong to starve’
‘My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done,…
Tales of the Occupation
Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has…
He’s not joking
At first sight, J — which has beenshortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — represents a significant departure for Howard…
Grappling with the impossible subject
‘Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he…
