John Baker’s Blog

Extract from a speech by Heinrich Himmler, to Schutzstaffel (SS) officers at Poznan on the 4th October,1943:
In the months that have gone by since we met in June 1942 many of our comrades were killed, giving their lives for Germany and the Fuhrer. In the first rank - and I ask you to rise in [...]

In The Guardian, Aida Edemariam interviewed Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple.
In her first memoir, Black, White and Jewish (2000), her daughter Rebecca remembers how “Daddy sits in sometimes with the rifle and the dog waiting for the Klan to come”; in The Same River Twice (1996), Alice writes of her own mother’s [...]

Broken Glass is a brave, bighearted attempt by one of the pathfinders of postwar drama to look at the tangle of evasions and hostilities by which the soul contrives to hide its emptiness from itself.
John Lahr.

Kristallnacht -1938 - the Nazis in Berlin smash the windows and destroy the contents of Jewish shops and synagogues. Old [...]