2025 marks 80 years since the liberation of the Third Reich’s camps. This significant anniversary will likely be the last in which survivors are still alive to tell their stories. When writer Kate Thompson went to visit 95-year-old Renee Salt in her London home she had no idea of the journey of discovery it would […]
A Mother’s Promise by Kate Thompson and Renee Salt
From invasion to liberation, September 1939 to April 1945, as Renee was marched from ghetto to camp, there was one constant. One hand that clutched hers – her mother’s. Every day for nearly six years, mother and daughter were bound together in hell. From Auschwitz-Birkenau to Bergen-Belsen, they were a powerful source of solace and […]
Auschwitz: the Biggest Black Market in Europe
Our guest this month, Chris Petit, filmmaker and author of The Butchers of Berlin, on life in the German garrison at Auschwitz. There were the Nazi death camps, where people were exported to die, and there was Auschwitz, where the choice after selection was immediate gassing or death deferred through forced labour. Then there was the […]
Unseen Auschwitz
William Ryan on the extraordinary photo album that inspired his novel, The Constant Soldier. The Constant Soldier is set at the end of World War 2 in a valley in what was then Nazi Germany, at a time when the war was lost. The novel, about a damaged German soldier seeking redemption, has its origins […]