In 1939, Nicholas Winton, with his colleagues in the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC), Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick, were responsible for bringing 669 children from Nazi-occupied Prague to the safety of the United Kingdom. Winton’s remarkable story was told in the recent film ‘One Life’, in which the brilliant Anthony Hopkins played … Read more
How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler recalls the black arts of propaganda from World War II. It is also a trumpet blast against the gullibility of today’s audiences brought up in England, told by Peter Pomerantsev, the son of a Kyiv dissident and leading expert on disinformation. In 1941, a shortwave German-language … Read more
Orphans of the Holocaust: Ottó Komoly’s Diary, Budapest 1944 By Thomas Komoly Published by Austin Macauley (London 2024) pp.205 In the northern Negev of Israel, there is a moshav, Yad Natan which reclaims the Hebrew name of one of the unsung heroes of wartime Budapest, Ottó Komoly (Natan Ze’ev Kohn) whose diplomatic initiatives amongst the … Read more
Sky Warriors: British Airborne Forces in the Second World War Saul David, published by William Collins 2024, pp. 552 The Traitor of Arnhem: WWII’S Greatest Betrayal and the Moment that Changed History Forever Robert Verkaik, published by Headline Welbeck 2024 pp.400 Eighty years ago, thousands of Allied paratroopers jumped out of aircraft and gliders into … Read more
‘Final Verdict: A Holocaust Trial in the Twenty-First Century’, by Tobias Buck Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, In October 2019, a 93-year-old man was wheeled into a Hamburg courtroom, hiding his face from the public gaze behind a red folder, a pair of dark sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat. Bruno Dey was accused of being involved … Read more
Safe Haven: The United Kingdom’s Investigations into Nazi Collaborators and the Failure of Justice by Jon Silverman and Robert Sherwood, published by Oxford University Press 2023, pp.309 Thirty years ago, the late David Cesarani published Justice Delayed which revealed that many Nazi collaborators were living peacefully in Britain. This followed on the heels of the War Crimes … Read more
There have been commemorations this year to mark several anniversaries: the assassination of President Kennedy (1963), the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Oslo Accords (1993). And less obvious ones that many in Jewish communities would prefer to forget such as the electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in Sing-Sing prison in 1953. Into this latter … Read more
The mourners gathered round the body at Alice Shalvi’s funeral in Jerusalem last Tuesday and sang with great emotion and passion, Eshet Chayil – “a woman of worth”. Chanted each Friday night to welcome in Shabbat, it summed up a woman who was deeply loved and revered. Her family, friends, community, students and colleagues in their hundreds accompanied … Read more
One area of the tortuous Israel-Palestine conflict that has been under-researched has been the ties between Nazi propaganda and Islamism. The German academic, Mattihas Küntzel, has attempted to fill in the gaps in this short, but absorbing book. Nazi propaganda regarded the spoken word as more effective than the written word and began to broadcast … Read more
In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the rise of European nationalism in the 19th century, Jews began to understand themselves in terms of more than a religion – a people with a history, a culture, a literature, and a plethora of languages. With the rise of antisemitism, many considered a territorial solution to the … Read more