the Holocaust
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
The Anne Frank story continues
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
A last-minute escape from the Holocaust
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
W.G. Sebald’s borrowed truths and barefaced lies
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…
Genocide is named and shamed
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
David Cesarani's final, fascinating, wrong-headed book
David Cesarani, Research Professor of History at Royal Holloway University of London, died at the age of 58 on 25…
What drove Europe into two world wars?
Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and…
A moving tribute to Janusz Korczak, hero of the Warsaw ghetto
‘My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done,…
Haunted by the Holocaust: Three novellas by Patrick Modiano
Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has…
Howard Jacobson’s J convinced me that I’d just read a masterpiece
At first sight, J — which has beenshortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — represents a significant departure for Howard…
The Zone of Interest is grubby, creepy – and Martin Amis's best for 25 years
‘Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he…
