The Long Night: A True Story, by Ernst Israel Bornstein.

The title here refers, not to a special night on a personal scale, but one on an eternal scale, of time and world civilisation - not an earthly night, even a polar one, of either romance or horror or anything on a human scale, but one that descended on the earth from what one can only describe as pure hell, and not accidentally either, but with every intention and design of being wrought complete annihilation of human civilisation, by those that perpetrated it.

The Long Night is about the years of WWII.

If it is extremely hard to read this book, it is only because truth stares one in face the moment one begins reading, and it is neither exaggerated nor sparing, neither overdoing any emotion nor pretending a detachment except as experienced, and the author has simply documented what he went through, events and experiences and feelings and thought. And he writes sparingly at that, obviously - the wartime years of hell he and his people went through, with whole clans wiped out and subsequently either forgotten or advised forgotten for sake of forgiveness for the perpetrators, cannot be captured except a mere glimpse of, in a book of memoirs so small and spare as this one.

Somewhere in midst of reading it one realises with a shock that one knows this particular place he mentions, or that, and one passed it while driving on a holiday, never having any idea of what went on there. Most with any idea of history of past century do know about the half a dozen or so most known concentration camps used in killing over six million Jews and several million others, at least the names, but there were dozen more if not two, three or more dozen.

It isn't that nobody else went through such tortures, humiliations, massacres. It is more that this was so deliberately intended to extinguish a whole civilisation, a section of humanity. That too isn't uncommon in history, but all the more why one recognises the whole hell. One doesn't need to compare if one knew a hell worse, one simply knows in one's heart how it is to be subjected to it, and one is able to identify with the story.

And yet, there are details unimaginable that one recoils from, with all the more horror at what the author and his people went through.

After one is finished reading the main part it is necessary to read the several appendices and understand, if one doesn't already, why it is necessary to keep this knowledge, this memory of this history, alive, and why it is a horrible idea - usually preached by all the seeming or so called liberals - to forgive and forget the perpetrators and move on. One can forgive the victims for not wanting to relive such horrors and for wanting to forget them, but that is a different story from the doctrine of forgiving all such crimes that are perpetrated with every intention of wreaking hell on the victims.

The Burning Spear; by John Galsworthy:-

One gets used to a certain pattern in reading an author's works, and generally Galsworthy is no exception to that - a reader reasonably begins to expect a diffused albeit not hidden description of beauty of England through his works, apart from questions of social status, English caste system, status of women, and more. His women are perhaps not strident in speaking but very eloquent in silently standing up for themselves and their rights not yet granted them by society. His upper caste isn't the caricature of a leftist author that whips the lower ones or starves them, but rather people who have an idea of noblesse oblige that they were brought up to or those not yet quite there.

And then one arrives at this work, a different one! Who knew Galsworthy could write a book to match a P.G. Wodehouse work in being so hilarious!

This one is difficult to describe in that it is like a one person play on stage where the artist is portraying everything ridiculous about various things one normally sees the humour of privately but suffers publicly, not because these things are always ridiculous but because often enough they are the scarecrows rather than valiant figures one is naturally inclined to revere. Duty to country, war, patriotism, roles of upper castes as defined in England and Europe in guiding the lower classes, and more than anything else, speeches and articles, are all out there held up to a mirror with the figure of a sincere but clueless man of upper classes out to do his bit in every way he can think of. The only other author who could and did hold up such a mirror was George Bernard Shaw, and he did it through various plays of his.

Not that any of these virtues are less than noble, but that lacking thought and perspective, those indulging in attempts do become a bit ridiculous. Not as much as the protagonist here, of course, who is a flawless stream of hilarious attempts to go from one effort to other and next in his quest to be of use during war and do his duty, while really being unaware of just how comic and more he is.

The House in Prague - How a Stolen House Helped an Immigrant Girl Find Her Way Home, by Anna Nessy Perlberg.

Reading any memoirs of the holocaust, or for that matter a book based on those times and those events, is hard enough. This one is by someone who was a little girl of ten by the time the horrors began, and the book begins with memories of the home of the family in Prague by the little girl, albeit written and published much later. The memories are of a beautiful life in a beautiful home, a large house on the hill in Prague, filled with music and more, with wealth of the educated, accomplished  and the connoisseur, rather than  wealth of the aristocracy which may or may not exercise their choice of ability to accrue all those qualities. The family moreover is of a mixed marriage, with a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, with much love and complete harmony.

This somehow makes for more horror for the reader who knows and dreads the subsequent events that will affect this family, their beautiful home and beautiful life filled with music, concerts, friends and family. Fortunately this family survived, by selling much of their prized possessions or using some to bribe whoever needed to be, to emigrate on the eve of the horrors descending on the world, centred on the continent. They managed to survive, do well, educate the children well, and live, in US.

But this only makes for a contrast when viewed in context of the family and friends and more that were lost due to not being able to, or in some cases, not choosing to, migrate as they did. A very moving moment is when the author, then still a young girl coping with high school in the new land, is asked by her father to accompany him to a synagogue for the first time - she is brought up Catholic - and mentions how the Rabbi asked if anyone lost a family member in the holocaust. She raises her hand, and looks around to see the whole congregation doing the same. They rise, sing prayers for the dead, all weeping.

It's a tale of life, survival and prospering of a few on the background of the six million or more that did not, and as such all the more poignant - for, obviously, if these people did so well, so could a large part of those that did not survive, and this loss of human potential and of quality was all because the lumpen that the perpetrated the events intended to wipe out human civilisation and all its achievements, in name of racial supremacy.

That another ideology in name of equality of all did much the same to a large proportion of the world population behind respective curtains of the totalitarian nations, only makes it worse. One is, of course, happy these good people did survive and did well.