Tadeusz Borowski — The Camps are Us
Massacre and genocide have been on the scroll of human history since cracked skulls left their sure signs, then in …
Tag Archives: WW II
Zone of Emptiness – A Japanese Novel of WWII
Zone of Emptiness by the Japanese novelist Hiroshi Noma, when it was published in 1952 after years of military censorship, …
Japan’s WW II Cinema: Bucking Up the Home Front
Watching Japanese films from the 1940s and 50s is difficult for many. No big sword fights,no clothing shed in intimate love affairs. …
Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945
It is hard to visualize, walking around Modena or Cremona or Verona, Italy as I have recently, that gangs of …
Andre Malraux — Man in his Violence
Andre Malraux was the quintessential adventurer-intellectual of the between the World War years. Man’s Hope was on 1960s high school …
The Twenty-Three Days of the City of Alba
World traveling, wine loving tourists might be forgiven for not associating the famed, vine-covered hills of Piemonte, Italy, with savage, civil …
Johnny The Partisan — Fighting in the Hills of Asti and Alba, Italy
The French resistance to the Nazis in WW II was much celebrated after the war. Whatever their actual resistance and …
The Face of War– Martha Gellhorn, Seven Wars
Martha Gellhorn (1908 – 1998,) wrote much and lived more. As Bill Buford, the fiction editor at “The New Yorker” …
Massacre in Rome, Richard Burton as a Nazi
Surely one of the lesser known movies from the Italian film corpus on WW II is Massacre in Rome, (Rappresaglia) …
Rome, Open City, 1945
The Nazi occupation of Rome ended on June 2, 1944, nine months after it had begun, four days before the …
Resisting Tyranny – Led by the Young
1972 in Czechoslovakia was 4 years after the 1968 Prague Spring, seven months of relative freedom which ended abruptly with …
Naples Liberated: Curzio Malaparte’s “The Skin”
It is hard to think of another work of fiction of such savage irony as Curzio Malaparte‘s La Pelle (1949) …