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 […]
The Wartime Book Club by Kate Thompson
Jersey, 1943. When the German Army invades the tranquil island, librarian Grace La Motée is determined to keep her services running. Ordered to destroy books which threaten the Nazi regime, she refuses, instead hiding them away and fighting back by forming a book club: a lifeline to help islanders escape the terror of war, one […]
The Wartime Book Club by Kate Thompson
Jersey, 1943, and, in what was once a warm and neighbourly community, German soldiers now patrol the cobbled streets, imposing a harsh rule on the people of the island. Grace La Mottée, the island’s only librarian, is ordered to destroy books which threaten the new regime. Instead, she hides the stories away in secret. Along […]
Uncovering Jersey’s wartime resistance
79 years after the occupation of the Channel Islands ended, novelist and journalist Kate Thompson writes about visiting Jersey, where she uncovered an island full of stories about wartime resistance. I fell in love with Jersey on a trip to the Jersey Festival of Words in September 2019. I defy anyone who visits not to. […]
Why I started a podcast – and what I learnt
Kate Thompson, the author and podcaster, looks at why she began From the Library with Love, the podcast series in which she interviews Britain’s wartime generation. What lessons has she learned during the past six months? I was given a piece of advice recently by a female writer far wiser than me: we all need […]
The Little Wartime Library by Kate Thompson
London, 1944, and Clara Button is no ordinary librarian. While the world remains at war, in East London Clara has created the country’s only underground library, built over the tracks in the disused Bethnal Green tube station. Down here a secret community thrives: with thousands of bunk beds, a nursery, a café and a theatre […]
Bethnal Green’s underground wartime library
Kate Thompson explains how working-class East Enders had access to books, entertainment and culture in an underground library during the Second World War, the background story to her new novel, The Little Wartime Library. June 13, 1944, and Bethnal Green is under fire. The streets are bathed in a choking, acrid smoke as a German […]