Anne Sebba

We should never take our daily bread for granted

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. One evening, freezing, starving and looking barely human, the group was stopped on the road back to camp by a stranger, a Protestant pastor who invited them into his house and, risking reprisals, nonetheless gave them a chance to warm up and eat some bread with a glass of wine. After the war, living in a small town where captured German soldiers were often paraded in the street and treated vengefully, the former prisoner of war remembered how he had once been shown human warmth at a critical moment and instructed his young son to take some bread to the prisoners.

Hiding from the Gestapo in plain sight in Berlin

Of the many bleak moments that have lodged in my mind since reading this extraordinary book the most unshakeable is the image of the once dignified Otto Neumann, walking to his death in torrential rain, with black shoe polish running down his face and into his eyes. Thus was his fate sealed as the silver hair revealed beneath ensured he was deemed too old to be selected for work. He was despatched instead to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But if this downpour, in a hideously crazy world, can be considered bad luck — after all, Otto and his wife Ella had by then managed against the odds to survive in the hell that was Terezin for two years — Hans, their young son then in hiding, was to have moments of astonishing good luck, which ensured his survival.

A life in pieces

When the poet George Szirtes returned as an adult to Budapest, the city of his birth which he had left as a child with his family in 1956, he experienced what became an abiding fantasy. He imagined his mother going back to the family flat but, instead of sitting down in a chair, she carried on walking through the wall until she emerged as a plaster statue: At that moment I realise… that Budapest is absolutely crammed with statues that were once people, people who had simply walked through the walls and become stylised allegorical figures, that this was their fate, hers, and mine too, come to that. This exquisitely told memoir is crammed with similarly evocative and occasionally deeply unsettling images. As Szirtes carefully peels back layers of history, he brings his mother not exactly back to life.

The man who kept re-inventing himself

When Romain Gary, a courageous and much decorated pilot in the RAF’s Free French squadron, was presented to the Queen Mother shortly after the second world war and asked about his background he apparently chose to remain silent. ‘Pour ne pas compliquer les choses,’ was his own version of the one-sided exchange. Gary, born Roman Kacew to Jewish parents probably in Vilna in 1914 and educated in Nice where he was taken as a teenager by his ambitious actress mother, was constantly re-inventing himself. In 1945, any explanation of how he had ended up in London, a captain, after his 1939 application to become a commissioned officer in the French army had been turned down, and how he had helped land a plane when the pilot had become temporarily blinded, would have seemed unbelievable.

Appointment in Sarajevo

In July 2001, a few days after Slobodan Milosevic was flown to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Janine di Giovanni went to Sarajevo to see how it felt for those who had suffered so brutally from his rule. But she found no one celebrating. Some of the ‘big fish’ were getting caught, but the ones who really did it — ‘the executioners’ as people call them — are still living peacefully, walking the streets. They are the men who raped and killed and burned and now sit in cafés in Foca and Srebrenica, confident that The Hague will never find them.In fact, there isn’t a lot of celebrating in this deeply disturbing book. Subtitled ‘A Memoir of War’, Janine di Giovanni has written much more than reports of battles waged, won or lost.

Go straight to Heaven

Tourists in downtown Calcutta (or Kolkata, as we all must now learn to say) cannot fail to be struck by a 50-foot mosaic of the city's most famous immigrant, Mother Teresa. The Skopje-born nun is smiling benignly on the snarled-up traffic chaos that belches and honks beneath her. To one side of this giant piece of wall-art is an advertisement proclaiming, 'Reserved for Calcutta's Best Brands'.Mother Teresa is Calcutta's best brand. Later this month, when, in record time, the Pope bestows on her the Vatican super seal of approval and declares her blessed, she will be well on her way to becoming a saint. Hers will probably become the fastest sainthood since the Roman Catholic Church set rules controlling saint-making in the 13th century.

Kissing and telling with gusto

Harriette Wilson’s Memoirsintroduced by Lesley BlanchPhoenix, £9.99, pp. 471, ISBN 1842126326 What do a modern New York psychoanalyst and a Regency London courtesan have in common? Both offer escape, relaxation and individual attention; both are expensive. ‘In place of the alcove there is the analyst’s office. But basically the functions of both analyst and courtesan have the same principle,’ explains Lesley Blanch in her expansive introduction to the memoirs of the most famous of English courtesans, Harriette Wilson. For some 15 years Harriette Wilson was all the rage in London political society. Men were desperate for her favours, just for a night if they could not be her long-term protector. She was not beautiful —although she cheekily told the Prince Regent, hoping for a meeting with him, that she was — but exuded sex appeal and vivacity.

Today

We should never take our daily bread for granted

We should never take our daily bread for granted

Saturday

Hiding from the Gestapo in plain sight in Berlin

Hiding from the Gestapo in plain sight in Berlin

Thursday

A life in pieces

A life in pieces

Thursday

The man who kept re-inventing himself

The man who kept re-inventing himself

Saturday

Appointment in Sarajevo

Appointment in Sarajevo

Saturday

Go straight to Heaven

Go straight to Heaven

Saturday

Kissing and telling with gusto

Kissing and telling with gusto