Anne Sebba

We should never take our daily bread for granted

In a moving combination of memoir and meditation, Predrag Matvejevic describes how a smuggled loaf to a starving PoW proved a life-saver

The baker and his assistant: miniature by Giovanni de Grassi — from The Medieval Health Handbook. Bridgeman Images

In the seventh and final chapter of this small but lingeringly powerful book, the author reveals his motivation for writing it. His father, he explains, a Russian-born Yugoslav soldier, had been a prisoner of war of the Germans, part of a group consigned to do forced labour felling trees during the bitterly cold winter of 1942-43.

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