Category: History

Reluctant World War Two hero Nicholas Winton is in the spotlight again with the release of the movie One Life starring Anthony Hopkins. After a […]

I based my book “Uncle Otto’s Puppet Theatre” on seven family memoirs, but I also read as much as I could about the Austro-Hungarian Empire. […]

Albert Einstein must have had hundreds of letters from desperate European Jews asking for help. My grandmother Emma was among those 1930s letter-writers to him […]

My father was 12 when he learned that he was Jewish and that life was no longer safe. Just after the Anschluss, his mother told […]

Every evening during the Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi ringleaders, after a day of sketching furiously in the press gallery, my great-uncle Otto Flatter would […]

Flamboyant Max Reinhardt was a theatrical revolutionary. A Jewish boy whose father was a corset-maker in Vienna, his wild creative ambitions brought revolving sets and […]

When in Vienna, my grandparents had been middle-class intellectuals; my grandfather a well-paid lawyer, my grandmother a socialist and music-lover. The Second World War put […]