Tag Archives: Book review

Arts, Books, Literature, Syria

Book Review: Syria’s Secret Library

LITERARY REVIEW

Syria Secret Library

Intro: Secret Library that made Syrians feel alive again

THE civil war in Syria is one of the undoubted horrors of our times. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and billions of dollars of damage has been done, essentially to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power.

His face is one which gives himself away. It’s the face of a weak man, promoted well beyond his gifts, compelled to become a bloodthirsty tyrant purely out of fear of the alternative. Does he sleep at night?

Mike Thomson is a widely travelled BBC correspondent who has often reported in war zones looking anxiously worried. His book is about the Syrian town of Daraya, which Assad decided harboured dangerous revolutionaries and so it attacked it with all the weaponry he had.

Most of the population left, but a few thousand remained and stuck it out. The siege lasted for several years before Assad’s superior firepower prevailed.

Astonishingly, Thomson didn’t ever actually go there. He wouldn’t have been able to – it was in lockdown and as tight as a drum. But war in the 21st century isn’t like previous wars. The availability of the internet and mobile phones changes the way things are analysed and reported. Daraya had almost no food or medical supplies, its electricity supplies at best intermittent and fresh water had long been cut off. Those who remained in Daraya rigged up makeshift aerials, allowing at least a rudimentary contact with the outside world.

Thomson made several friends and acquaintances through this method and what these people did was, by any measure, extraordinary. They went around abandoned houses and rescued as many books as they could, then created a secret library in the basement of a ruined building. This was an incredibly dangerous thing to do.

Snipers were everywhere and no one carrying a huge pile of books was going to be moving very fast. Astoundingly, no one was killed. Of even more surprise, Assad’s soldiers never worked out what they were up to.

The Secret Library became a haven for the peacefully inclined to come and read books and feel alive again. It was presided over by a 14-year-old who called himself Chief Librarian and rarely left the building.

There are several photographs of people sitting on sofas, quietly reading of worlds far beyond their own.

Thomson writes breezily of dreadful things, although much of the detail is fascinating.

One woman, whose family lived far away, dared not try to contact them directly, but showed them that she was still alive by changing her Facebook photo image every day.

As food supplies dwindled, one man acquired a small quantity of sheep’s liver. He invited a few friends around to share it and they cooked it slowly to savour the wonderful smell.

Unfortunately, they all left the room at the same moment and, when they came back, they found that the sheep’s liver was gone, and the cat was licking its lips with satisfaction.

If this book has a weakness, there’s not actually very much in it about the Secret Library and some readers may finish it feeling obscurely cheated.

However, the story of Daraya is nonetheless hugely stirring: of people refusing to give in against impossible odds and the appalling consequences of one man’s palpable weakness.

– Syria’s Secret Library by Mike Thomson is published by Weidenfeld, 320pp

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Arts, Books, History

Book Review: The Sisters of Auschwitz

Sisters of Auschwitz

Intro: They fearlessly hid fellow Jews in their house in the woods, until they were betrayed and sent to Auschwitz. A devastating new book reveals the selfless courage of two young women.

WHEN Dutch author and journalist Roxane van Iperen and her husband first glimpsed the High Nest, they fell instantly in love with it. A romantic, shuttered house tucked away in the woods 30 miles from Amsterdam, with friendly dormer windows and a rambling garden, it was the dream and idyllic country hideaway they’d been looking for.

As soon as they started restoring the house, they began to unearth its secrets. They found trap doors in each room, with shallow hiding places underneath, containing candle stumps and old resistance newspapers.

Roxane found herself almost at once embarking on a double-reconstruction: both of the house she had newly acquired, and of the story whose wartime secrets it concealed.

This gripping, nightmarish story delivers a stark contrast between the peacefulness by which the reader can absorb its contents at will as opposed to the terror under which Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe lived.

Roxane discovered the High Nest had been a haven of secret refuge for at least 17 Jews for a year and a half during the war – until the dreadful moment in 1944 when they were betrayed by a malicious neighbour from the village.

What makes this story especially fascinating is that the two women who led this hidden pocket of Dutch resistance were themselves Jewish: married sisters, Janny and Lien Brilleslijper – both mothers of small children.

 

THEY were a normal musical and artistic family, living in bustling Amsterdam until the Nazi nightmare came to wreck their lives. Janny was the instinctive rebel. When the Nazis invaded, she refused to get her passport stamped with a ‘J’ (for ‘Jew’), as ordered by the regime.

However some 160,820 Jews, including her more obedient sister Lien, did get their passports stamped – ‘a small administrative action that will prove most helpful for the deportation system’, writes Roxane as she tells this whole story in the present tense, forcing the reader to live every second of it with the characters. At the same time Anne Frank and her family were in hiding in their Amsterdam attic, forced to live in total silence during the daytime for fear of being discovered by the workers downstairs, this family had chanced upon the High Nest and leased it, in February 1943, from two posh sisters who had no idea they were Jews.

It’s a sublime moment of relief when the family moves to this woodland hideaway, three miles from the nearest neighbour. The children are free to run in the garden and shout, and grown-ups can play the piano and sing without being heard. Heroic Janny not only runs the household as a refuge for Jews but steals out every day to risk her life on secret resistance work, taking trains to Amsterdam with forged documents hidden in her bra.

It’s Janny and Lien’s ingenious younger brother Jaap who build the hiding places all over the house. There is an agreed drill, so everyone vanishes into their designated cubby holes as soon as danger is announced.

Jaap also comes up with a method to alert anyone outside the house not to return: if there is no Chinese vase in the front window, don’t come back. Just like the Franks, this family rejoices when they hear the news of the D-Day landings. Not long to go now, surely.

And they would probably have made it, but for the fanatical fervour of the Dutch-Nazi Jew-hunters, who rejoiced in flushing out Jews from their hiding places.

What revolting specimens of humans would take pleasure in being the ‘finders’ in a game of hide-and-seek in which the ‘found’ are sent to extermination camps?

Roxane reminds us of the statistic: in Belgium, 30 per cent of the country’s Jews were deported; in France, it was 25 per cent; but in Holland, it was 76 per cent.

In the Brilleslijpers’ case, they were betrayed by a suspicious woman in the village who scribbled their address on a crumpled bit of paper and handed it to a Dutch Nazi.

On that fateful day in July 1944, Janny had been doing her resistance work in Amsterdam, her little son Robbie with her as camouflage. They walked home through the woods together as normal. But they failed to notice the signal; the Chinese vase had gone from the window.

They walked up to the front door – and it was opened by a Jew-hunter. Reading this made me feel giddily faint. Roxane brilliantly conveys the acute terror felt by members of the household, gathered quaking in the drawing-room while the searches went round the house chivvying out the others.

Lien had a fit of hysteria, half-faked and half-genuine. ‘Not the children!’ she screamed. The Jew-hunter eventually relented, and the three children were dropped off at the local doctor’s, while the rest were taken first to prison, then to Westerbork holding camp, and then – yes – to Auschwitz.

The only glimmer of light was that, before deportation, Lien received a coded message that their children were safe.

 

SHOULD you ever have wondered – and who hasn’t – what it was like to make a three-day journey in an overcrowded cattle truck from one’s native land to Auschwitz, this book gives us an account in hour-by-hour detail.

Their train happened to be the very last to Auschwitz from Holland, an ordeal of buckets, moans, stench, of taking turns to press up against tiny cracks in the wood for oxygen. Then, the moment of arrival, the gulps of fresh air – and that increasingly familiar experience of hope being dashed.

Or not quite dashed, because those sisters had each other. Their parents were gassed on arrival, but Janny and Lien, younger and fitter, were kept alive. They were present at the final ‘selection’ in which Anne and Margot Frank’s mother was separated from her daughters and taken away to be killed.

And thence to Bergen-Belsen. At least this place wasn’t an extermination camp. Yet Belsen exterminated people through its own chaos of disease and starvation. Here, Janny and Lien did their best to nurse young Anne and Margot Frank, but the will to live drained out of the girls as they succumbed to typhus. Janny wrapped their bodies in blankets and lowered them gently and lovingly into the pit. The sisters were the ones who told Otto Frank, after the war, exactly what had befallen his daughters in their last hours.

So Janny and Lien did survive. There’s a joyous moment of reunion at the end of this book, which many readers may well have difficulty coping with – and Janny, who had managed to hold back her tears during all those black years, cried her eyes out at last.

– The Sisters of Auschwitz by Roxane Van Iperen is published by Seven Dials, 320pp

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Arts, Books, China

Book Review: The Colour Of The Sky After Rain

MEMOIR

WHEN King George III’s ambassador was trying to negotiate a trade deal in China in 1793, he decided to curry favour with the Emperor by presenting him with a carriage which, thanks to the advancement of British engineering, was splendour in comfort and elegance.

Sadly, this grand gesture was a disaster. The carriage was designed so the driver sat higher up than the passenger – and the idea that Emperor Qianlong should be placed below someone else was gravely insulting to the Chinese.

As the ambassador said ruefully: ‘Nothing could be more fallacious than to judge of China by any European standard.’ More than two centuries later, are we any nearer to understanding China and its customs?

Apart from pandas, pollution, terracotta warriors and the Great Wall, most of us have only the haziest notion of what this vast country, which makes up a fifth of the globe’s population and is the world’s largest economy after the U.S. is really like.

One person who knows China well is Tessa Keswick, who is besotted with the country and has travelled widely there for the past 40 years. The daughter of the Scottish war hero Lord Lovat, she worked in business before becoming Kenneth Clarke’s political adviser, and then Director of the Centre for Policy Studies.

She is married to Henry Keswick, until recently the taipan (boss) of Jardine Matheson, the vast Hong Kong-based conglomerate. He was born in Shanghai: ‘I sometimes think he has Chinese blood in his veins . . . he is often more at home with Chinese than with Europeans,’ she muses.

The Colour Of The Sky After Rain is classified as a memoir but it is also an enticing travel guide.

Keswick has visited places that most foreigners (or guilou) never see and has witnessed first-hand the astounding changes this ‘impossibly difficult and completely fascinating country’ has recently gone through. From superhighways to vast airports, the transformation of the country since the death of Chairman Mao has happened at a dizzying pace – not least because the authorities have the last word in everything and there’s no room for dissent. In China, HS2 would have been built in a flash.

On her trips to the country in the early 1980s, the towns Keswick visited were pitifully dilapidated. She stayed in a hotel where rodents were so veracious that one of her travelling companions found all of the snacks in his suitcase had been eaten during the night, along with his toothpaste and chewing gum.

When she and Henry went on a ‘luxury cruise’ down the Yangtze River, they spotted a body floating past them, ‘a man in a peasant’s red suit, swollen up like a Michelin man . . . behind him comes a pink pig, also inflated with water and air, the four stiff trotters sticking up.’

She couldn’t have foreseen that within a few years, China would have undergone a startling revolutionary change.

The capital, Beijing, has gone from being in a state of ‘morbid depression’ to ‘a glorious modern megalopolis . . . one of my favourite cities in the world.’

While she admires the way millions of Chinese have been lifted out of poverty, Keswick also mourns what has been lost. Ancient towns and buildings have been ruthlessly swept away in the rush for progress, sometimes all too literally.

When the Three Gorges Dam was built on the Yangtze, it flooded thousands of towns and villages and displaced 1.4 million people.

Keswick is an engaging, lively guide and she is at her best when writing about the Chinese landscape.

In Yunnan, said to have some of the most fertile soil in the world, she marvels at thickets of forsythia and forests of camellias – a reminder that about half of the plants growing in British gardens originated in China.

There are useful nuggets throughout the book on how to behave when doing business with the Chinese. Even the smallest attempts at speaking Mandarin are met with delight.

British self-deprecation, on the other hand, goes down like a lead balloon. Commenting that China’s spanking new roads are so much better than British ones is seen as demeaning. ‘The Chinese are attracted by success and by self-confidence, and these generate respect,’ she counsels.

Above all, be punctual. Being late is unacceptably impolite, as the Queen found out on a state visit to China when, most uncharacteristically, she arrived three minutes late for an engagement.

The following day, the Chinese retaliated by being exactly three minutes late for her.

– The Colour Of The Sky After Rain by Tessa Keswick is published by Head of Zeus, 384pp

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