Both her parents were in different Dutch hospitals where her father eventually died of cancer of the jaw Edith’s mother

Both her parents were in different Dutch hospitals, where her father eventually died of cancer of the jaw Edith’s mother and grandmother were gassed at Sobibor. Her brother, Jules, also went underground, hoping to escape to England, but was betrayed and died in Auschwitz.Edith’s account of her life in Breda is the most vivid evocation of the experience of Nazi occupation that I have read. It is not based on her diary – keeping one was too dangerous because, if discovered, it would compromise others – but on memories and letters, primarily between Edith and her parents. The latter not only share their daughter’s literary gifts, but their writing conveys a love, understanding and stoicism which sustain Edith – through the risks of capture or betrayal which make it impossible for her to be herself, through the strains of her dependence on her hosts’ family, through the suffering and death in her own. She develops from a slightly dippy, self-absorbed child into a tolerant and compassionate adult who confronts suffering without self-pity or bitterness and devotes herself to working for the future.Of course, Edith was very lucky Less than one in five Dutch Jews survived Of the 24,000 Jews who hid in Holland, 8,000 were betrayed Tine zur Kleinsmiede became a second mother to Edith.

When she was honoured in Israel in 1983, she said “Anyone would have done the same thing, in my place. Any decent person, that is.”The others are thin on the ground in Edith’s Book. When, years later, a friend has to remind Edith of two classmates who became Nazis and turned on her, she is forced to acknowledge that her recollections are “skewed towards examples of loyalty and courage shown by friends and strangers. If something did not fit in with this glowing picture of my fellow countrymen, I refused to process it.”Edith’s Book is neither sanguine nor sentimental about the Holocaust and man’s capacity for evil. It shows that a belief in goodness, which also turns out to be a religious (in Edith’s case Jewish) belief, is the key to living well with such a past.

It is a marvellous corrective not only to the cult of Anne Frank, but to the modern appetite for victimology.. The chief executive of the Samaritans responds to

Jeremy Laurance’s article on suicide
WHILE I welcome Jeremy Laurance’s piece (“Why suicide rates in men are dropping”), it is important to highlight the relationship between access to means of suicide and suicide rates.Mr Laurance seems to have misunderstood The Samaritans’ response to these figures Indeed his own response seems contradictory We are delighted by any moves which reduce suicide. For example, we welcome the recent moves for smaller paracetamol pack sizes – another attempt to reduce suicide through reduced access to means of suicide.While the Government is in the business of reducing access to means, though, we are in the business of improving access to help.One in every 100 people who attempts suicide will die by suicide within a year of an attempt, a risk that is about 100 times that of the general population The risk increases dramatically with every attempt. Suicide kills two young people a day, 80 per cent of whom are young men. It would be difficult to suggest this was an acceptable figure.So while a saved life means the survivor now has the chance to “renew” it, they must be offered help to do this.

Very many survivors say they hadn’t wanted to die, they just couldn’t go on living the way they were. The Samaritans encourages callers to consider the finality of suicide and to explore other options. They encourage people to contact them sooner rather than later in a bid to address the sense of despair before it reaches suicidal proportions.The Samaritans believes that, in a community with improved emotional wellbeing, fewer “impulsive and desperate gestures” in the form of suicide attempts will take place How can Mr Laurance consider that a problem?. TO BE remembered solely as the director of The Mousetrap might seem a humiliating destiny for a man of Peter Cotes’s wide-ranging and often courageous talent. He gave theatre-goers some of the most remarkable nights of their life, especially when his wife the actress Joan Miller played the lead or one of his favourite actors, Wilfrid Lawson, played Strindberg’s The Father.

He also fought against what he saw as the evils of the star system which afflicted the West End in his day as now. He hated acting which exploited the actor’s personality rather than the playwright’s character. He struggled hard, and to some extent successfully, to establish in the 1940s and 1950s a group theatre company along the democratic lines of Harold Clurman’s famous pre-war American model.
He also defied the two most powerful men in the British theatre, the Lord Chamberlain as censor of plays, and Hugh (“Binkie”) Beaumont who controlled the fortunes of the West End theatre and the lives of most people who worked for it.There is no doubt about it. Cotes had guts; and though he had his setbacks and his principles (are they not bound together?) he survived There was no keeping him down. If the theatre seemed at one point impregnable he went off and made films (he was the slightly older brother of those film- making twins the Boultings, John and Roy), or directed plays and series for television.And, if there was nothing else doing or while he was doing that he wrote books on George Robey or Charlie Chaplin (The Little Fellow: the life and work of Charles Spencer Chaplin, with Thelma Niklaus, 1951; George Robey: “the darling of the halls”, 1972) or his idea of what the theatre ought to do: in a fiery tome called No Star Nonsense (1949), he attacked practically all the West End stood for.He had his hits, in the West End and on Broadway; and the one that resonated round the realm was Pick-Up Girl which moved from his cosy club theatre in Notting Hill into the West End as soon as Queen Mary had seen it. Yet it is as The Mousetrap’s director that he created theatrical history.It wasn’t that he was remembered strictly for his direction of the play, for the way he orchestrated its original production; not even his flatterers would argue that, though nearly all the first-night notices of 1952 paid tribute to the subtlety and atmosphere, timing and tension of his staging. The tribute paid to him as director ever since the play opened in Newcastle upon Tyne had nothing to do with the art of the theatre It was his royalties.