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Clara's War
Clara's War
Nov 15, 2024 7:23 PM

Author:Clara Kramer,Rula Lenska

Clara's War

On 21 July 1942 the Nazis invaded Poland. In the small town of Zolkiew, life for Jewish 15-year-old Clara Kramer was never to be the same again. While those around her were either slaughtered or transported, Clara and her family hid perilously in a hand-dug cellar. Living above and protecting them were the Becks.

Mr Beck was a womaniser, a drunkard and a self-professed anti-Semite, yet he risked his life throughout the war to keep his charges safe. Nevertheless, life with Mr Beck was far from predictable. From the house catching fire, to Beck's affair with Clara's cousin, to the nightly SS drinking sessions in the room just above, Clara's War transports you into the dark, cramped bunker, and sits you next to the families as they hold their breath time and again.

Sixty years later, Clara Kramer has created a memoir that is lyrical, dramatic and heartbreakingly compelling. Despite the worst of circumstances, this is a story full of hope and survival, courage and love.

Reviews

Roger Moorhouse has a deep knowledge of Wartime Germany... Moorhouse has a nice eye for social detail

—— Max Hastings , Sunday Times

As a leading historian of modern Germany, Moorhouse has chronicled a largely unknown story with scholarship, narrative verve and, at times, an awful, harrowing immediacy

—— Ian Thompson , Sunday Telegraph

Moorhouse's evocative social history of Hitler's capital brings all these aromas together, along with the sights, sounds, thoughts and feelings of the ordinary Germans who lived here

—— Keith Lowe , Daily Telegraph

Few books on the war genuinely increase the sum of our collective knowledge of this exhaustively covered period, but this one does... By trawling through the complex, often deeply morally compromised personal stories of many survivors, Moorhouse has produced new insights into the way ordinary Berliners tried to escape the disastrous ill-fortune of living in the belly of the beast

—— Andrew Roberts , Financial Times

Roger Moorhouse's measured, sympathetic book offers a fascinating corrective to that Anglocentric perspective... After reading this thorough and engaging book you'll never be able to watch a war film or even a World Cup football match in quite the same way

—— James Delingpole , Daily Mail

It provides something rare: a popular history account that will satisfy both general readers and professional historians

—— Irish Times

Roger Moorhouse has marshalled an impressive range of primary sources including newspaper reports, official documents, memoirs, diaries and interviews with the dwindling band of survivors to create a gripping panorama of Berlin at war... Moorhouse's meticulous and painstaking research matched by his narrative verve, wide ranging sympathy and eye for telling detail

—— CJ Schuler , The Independent

A finely observed social history of Berliners during the war

—— Sunday Times

There is a haunting quality to Roger Moorhouse's Berlin at War, the ominous drumbeat of approaching nemesis for ordinary civilians who, since 1933, had witnessed and participated in the rise of the Nazi cult

—— Sinclair McKay , Daily Telegraph, Christmas round up

The searing experiences of Berliners are brought to life through often deeply morally compromised personal stories

—— Financial Times, Christmas round up

Moorhouse has a deep knowledge of wartime Germany...he has a nice eye for social detail

—— Sunday Times

Moorhouse has written an extraordinarily detailed account of ordinary life in Berlin during the Second World War

—— Sunday Herald

There's a pounding quietness to Moorhouse's description of life in Berlin

—— Vera Rule , Guardian

A well-researched, fluently-written and utterly absorbing account of what life (and, so very often) death was like for ordinary Germans in the capital of Hitler's Reich during the Second World War. The Berliners' capacity for suffering, for sacrifice, for self-delusion, but also astonishingly for love - and even on occasion humour - is superbly evoked by Moorhouse's cornucopia of new information

—— Andrew Roberts, author of The Storm of War

Berlin at War is a well-researched and beautifully composed account, vividly recreating those years of Nazi arrogance, oppression, and corruption, that ended in such terrible destruction and civilian suffering

—— Antony Beevor

Wonderful ... an amazing panoramic view ... I've rarely read anything like it

—— Claire Tomalin

A masterful account of lost and stolen lives

—— Sunday Times

Awesome ... one of the most unforgettable books I have ever read. I defy anyone to read it without weeping at its human suffering, cruelty and courage ... in this book these righteous heroes have their rightful memorial

—— Simon Sebag Montefiore , Mail on Sunday

Sheds new light on history that we thought we knew... meticulously detailed and very readable

—— David Willetts , New Statesman

The miracle is that there isn’t a dull page. As it moves towards its deadly climax, the story hangs together as tightly as a thriller. Into the Silence is as monumental as the mountain that soars above it; small wonder that it won the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction … Once you start wandering the snowy passes with Mallory and the lads, you won’t want to come down again. There can be no better way, surely, to spend a week in winter

—— Arminta Wallace , Irish Times

He sees the climbers as haunted dreamers, harrowed by their desperate experiences in the First World War, living amid romantic dreams of Imperial grandeur and the elemental, sublime grandeur of the mountain

—— Steve Barfield , Lady

This is the awesomely researched story of Mallory, Irvine and the early Everest expeditions. It puts their efforts and motivations into the context of Empire and the first world war in a way I don’t think previous books have ever managed

—— Chris Rushby , Norfolk Magazine

A vivid depiction of a monumental story…Wade Davis’ passion for the book shines through and I can only hope that his next book doesn’t take as long to write as I will certainly be reading it

—— Glynis Allen , Living North
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