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Sunday's child? A memoir By Leslie Baruch Brent. Bankhouse Books, New Romney 2009. 308 pp. £15.99.
In one of the last Red Cross letters to England that Lothar Baruch received from Germany in 1942, his father wrote, 'You will make your way alright, you are after all Sunday's child', which signifies good fortune. Lothar, who was obliged to anglicise his name to Leslie Baruch Brent on joining the British army, was born in 1925 in Köslin, then a German town near the Baltic coast. He had a happy childhood until he went to secondary school where he was the only Jewish boy in the class and was increasingly subjected to bullying and humiliation. Fortunately, his father knew the director of the Pankow Jewish orphanage in Berlin who agreed to take the boy. Like all such organisations it was increasingly attacked by the mob, culminating in Kristallnacht at the end of 1938. As a result Kindertransports were organised to send Jewish children out of the country and, at the age of 13, Lothar Baruch...