THE FIRST DAY OF THE BLITZ by Peter Stansky
Yale £16.99 pp212
Buy the book here at the offer price of £15.29 (inc p&p)

At teatime on September 7, 1940, 1,000 German planes crossed the Channel into British airspace. The fighters and bombers, which filled 800 square miles of sky, were on their way to bomb London. Before the war, predictions of what would happen to a vast metropolis under bombardment from the air had been apocalyptic. In 1936, Bertrand Russell had suggested that, if London were bombed, it would become “one vast, raving bedlam”, peopled largely by the dead, the dying and those driven insane by terror. The first day of the Blitz did not result in quite the armageddon that Russell and others had imagined but, as Stansky’s vivid narrative shows, it was, nevertheless, a frightening and unprecedented assault on the city. From the ruins of the buildings levelled on that first night, the myth of the Blitz, still potent today, arose. Stansky makes well-judged use of eyewitness accounts to highlight the reality behind that myth.

THEIR DARKEST HOUR: People Tested to the Extreme in WWII by Laurence Rees
Ebury £18.99 pp310
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At the age of 24, Petras Zelionka, a Lithuanian and Nazi collaborator, took part in mass killings of Jewish men, women and children after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Aged only 19, a Polish Jew named Samuel Willenberg arrived at the death camp of Treblinka. He survived where tens of thousands didn’t because he was arbitrarily chosen to become one of the small number of prisoners forced to assist in the killing process. As young men, both Zelionka and Willenberg, perpetrator and victim of atrocities, had experiences largely unimaginable for most of us. As old men, they spoke of them to Laurence Rees, the film-maker. Their words, together with those of 33 others with similarly appalling memories, are recorded in Their Darkest Hour. Some stories demand more space than they are given – each witness Rees has gathered has no more than a few pages to tell his or her tale – but all are powerful and unsettling.

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