Not since we were teens together and joined a book club that would mail title selections to us at an inexpensive price, did we practise the habit of reading the same books. Now, a lifetime later, we possess hundreds of our own books in a library whose shelves are on the verge of bursting with a plenitude of choices we have yet to read, our interests in reading materials have diverged.

We seldom read the same books, although we do tend to discuss what we've read with one another, often. This time, in the decision of what each of us independently decided to read, there is a bit of a connection. My husband was reading Jan Dalley's Diane Mosley, a Life, while I was reading Martin Gilbert's The Boys: Triumph over adversity.

My husband has had an abiding interest in all things British, as long as I can recall. And I was introduced to the horrors of the Second World War focus on annihilation of Europe's Jews at my most impressionable age, as a child. It's strange; my father felt that from the age of eight forward it would be suitable to introduce me to the reality of the Holocaust through what was being said in the Jewish community in horrified, hushed tones, and whatever was being written at the time.

I, on the other hand, raising three children with their father, sought to protect and shield them from details of that dreadful period in history when the monstrosity of human dysfunction led to a hugely destructive war, responsible for the deaths of millions of people, along with the haunting understanding that the world was and remains prepared to do little in defense of Jewish lives wherever the threat emanates from.


I had long ago been told by my husband of the Mitford sisters, a story of British society and moneyed elite's fascination with and support for German fascism. Who isn't aware of Winston Churchill's steadfast determination to defeat the Nazi juggernaut? And who is aware that during the war years, Churchill's friendship with Diana Mosley -- one of the Mitford sisters who married the staunch fascist and Hitler associate Sir Oswald Mosley -- led him to compassionately arrange for her to share living arrangements in prison with her husband rather than keep them apart.

Members of the British aristocracy many of whom were fascist sympathizers and who gave great moral and emotional support to baronet Mosley when he was imprisoned during the war years, and his wife as well in recognition of their support for and friendship with Adolf Hitler, had influence with Winston Churchill at whose ancestral home Diana Mitford and her brother Tom stayed and played in their childhood years. They were all successfully instrumental in reuniting husband-and-wife-Mosley during their incarceration, and freeing them from prison to resume their place in British high society, post-conflict.

As for "The Boys", they were what remained of young Jewish concentration camp survivors who agreed to convey to historian Martin Gilbert their memories of their lives as children in Poland, living in mostly or partially Polish-Yiddish 'shtetles', and the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism that distinguished their lives as Jewish children. From those reminiscences, came their personal documentation of the onset of war when Germany invaded Poland, and how the Jews fared, both initially and eventually in death camps.