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Index: History & Travel

Missing in Mechelen.

The Search for Estera Pesa Nasielski To commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the resistance attack on the twentieth Jewish convoy from Mechelen, Belgium to Auschwitz Birkenau, Poland on 19 April 1943.   By Will Stone.   oday there is no one left alive who remembers Estera Pesa Nasielski of Brussels as a living person. She […]

At Risk of Interment.

W.G. Sebald in Terezin and Breendonk.     By Will Stone. I don’t think you can focus on the horror of the Holocaust. It’s like the head of the Medusa. You carry it with you in a sack, but if you looked at it, you’d be petrified. —W.G. Sebald     Preface he two locations […]

We need to talk about Vladimir.

Jonathan Gorvett: The current conflict is also even sometimes described as a ‘proxy war’ between Russia and the US — even though the former country is directly involved and indeed, is actually the invading, war-starting party.’

Wonder Travels: A Memoir.

Josh Barkan: ‘I’d loved her, and even cherished her, and put her on a bit of a pedestal, and had really tried to be a good husband to her, and had, in fact, been a good husband to her. From my perspective, she’d never grown up.’

In Famagusta.

Jonathan Gorvett: ‘The ultimate Cyprob ‘beginning’ can even be Mesozoic. While ‘Turkish’ north of Cyprus is dominated by jagged, igneous uplift – really part of the ‘Turkish’ Anatolian mainland, forty odd miles away to the north – the ‘Greek’ south’s Troodos range is a more worn-down ophiolite, its rock, mud and shale mass long separated from the northern peaks by a shallow sea – today’s plain of Mesaoria, onto which Famagusta now backs.’

More from ‘The Messenger House’.

Janet Sutherland: ‘…and throwing a dollar to the astounded and horror -stricken owner, we hoped to escape in peace to our han. Vain delusion! The uproar which followed could not have exceeded if the Arnouts had stormed Hassan-a-Palanka…’

A book of Bessie and Sallyann.

Paul Holman: ‘So I stand before this master of all the king’s horses, who has diminished over the centuries to become a transmission through a ghost box, a spook to prank kids. His face, beheld at last, is that of a patrician bully, smooth with the untroubled assumption of power…’

Arabia Felix.

Jonathan Gorvett: ‘In Dubai, and the UAE more generally, a further aspect to this consists of the fact that the largest corporations and the government are essentially the same thing. The boards of all the big enterprises – typically in oil and gas, construction and real estate – also consist of the same people who constitute the ruling families of the “government”.’

A resumé of Resistance.

Ian Seed: ‘”Curriculum Violette” offers us a fleeting and yet powerful portrait of the life of Violette Szabo (1921-45), a French-born British agent who fought alongside members of the French Resistance and who died in Ravensbrück concentration camp.’

The Iron Pier.

John Matthias: ‘She remembers a cold November night when she was in her bath with the curtains drawn across the window in strict adherence to the blackout rules. She hears a foghorn out at sea, which she thinks strange because the night is clear. Suddenly the door bursts open and her mother rushes in waving a telegram. “Darling it’s over, it’s over,” she shouts.’

Dionysus in diaspora.

Matt Hanson: ‘In generations past, the steps to Kehila Kedosha Janina were consecrated by the profound nostalgia of a people linked to their beloved city. In its synagogue, Greek- speaking Jews prayed for the land which had been synonymous with the community itself for a thousand years. For its descendants, whether religious or not, Kehila Kedosha Janina stands as a doorway of return, and more, as a spiritual mirror that reflects in each and every individual the significance of who came before them.’

Candid Camera.

Christopher Landrum: ‘“Greater love,” says the Gospel of John, “hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” I don’t know if Chris Arnade crossed the threshold into feeling love for his subjects (though he did rescue the body of a dead back row acquaintance from the anonymity of a pauper’s grave). But no reader of ‘Dignity’ can deny that its author did lay down his career and dared to listen to back row individuals and let them speak for themselves.’

Why is the sea salt?

Nigel Wheale: ‘Ian Crockatt has translated all thirty-eight of Rognvaldr’s surviving verses, which were preserved in the (textually complex) Orkneyinga saga. Rognvaldr may again have been profoundly innovative here, as one of the earliest Norse authors to have his vernacular work preserved in written form, rather than recited from generation to generation…

The Jinn of Failaka.

Martin Rosenstock: ‘After forty-five minutes on grey and choppy waters, I see the coastline and some low-slung buildings strung out along it. The harbor of Failaka appears to have silted up, for we anchor off the coast and a smaller boat comes alongside to ferry us to a make-shift pier of plastic pontoons. The air here is crisp with a touch of salt.’

Pages from the Croatian Notebook.

Franca Mancinelli: ‘My body has an open texture from which hangs a thread. Someone at the other end, without even noticing, pulls it, and slowly I grow thin. The absence beckons me. I approach the spirits of the cold, that white wordless nucleus which governs this earth. I close my eyes, as if pervaded by a flat colorless sea.
I’m starting to translate snow…