For the first half of this century, during one of the longest active political careers in this country, Winston Churchill was interested and sympathetic to Zionism. Hating tyranny in all its forms, he had reacted strongly against the Tzarist pogroms in the first years of the century and always understood…
The two escapees were determined to alert the outside world to the reality of Auschwitz, and to the fate that seemed to be in store for the Jews of Hungary. Wetzler, who was twenty-six, had been an actual witness of the destruction of the Theresienstadt family camp. Vrba was nineteen…
Among his many trips to Poland, the first as a university student in 1959, the last in 2011, was this August 1980 visit to the former Jewish cities, towns and villages, to the mass murder sites and death camps to which the Jews of Europe were taken to be murdered,…
The First Crosby Kemper Lecture, delivered by Sir Martin Gilbert at the Winston Churchill Memorial, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri , April 26, 1981. President Saunders, ladies and gentlemen, I am deeply honoured to be invited here to Westminster College to talk at the site of Churchill’s famous ‘Iron Curtain Speech,’ and…
Picture: Randolph Churchill, Stour, East Bergholt, February 1965 My employment with Randolph Churchill began in October 1962, on my twenty-sixth birthday. Given Randolph’s reputation for drink and anger, my friends and I assumed that my engagement would be of short duration. I was still there, as part of his team…
Speech given at the India International Centre, Delhi: 3 June 2002 I first came to this great city in 1958 forty-four years ago, and was present when Jawaharlal Nehru spoke at the Red Fort on the eleventh anniversary of Indian Independence – to a crowd estimated at one million. In…
Yitzhak Rabin and John Major during a reception ceremony in Jerusalem’s Rose Garden Credit: National Photo Collection; Photo by Sa’ar Ya’acov, 12/03/1995 By Martin Gilbert It was my good fortune to have met Yitzhak Rabin a number of times during the last twenty years of his cruelly truncated life. Our…
You may have noticed … different spellings for Hanukah. Gloria Donen Sosin, an American correspondent of mine, has just sent me an article in which she notes no less than eighteen different spellings – in English transliteration alone – of the five Hebrew letters that make up the name of…
In 2006, when Martin’s book Kristallnacht came out, he was invited to a party to celebrate the book and to launch it on its way. The party was held at the Residence of the German Ambassador in London, and our host was the German Chargé d’Affaires, Hans-Henning Blomeyer-Bartenstein. Martin brought…
“Kristallnacht taught several lessons. It taught those who were the source of prejudice that a whole people can be demonised; that a whole nation can be turned totally and obscenely against a decent, hard-working, creative, loyal and integral part of its own society. This point was made on 19 August…
Extracts from Sir Martin’s unpublished diary Coming to Israel on 4 October 1973 to research Churchill’s 1921 visit there, Sir Martin was caught up in the conflict as a volunteer, and keen to record history as it happened: 5.30 am. Give a lift to an Englishman trying to get to…
Churchill for today, Teaching the Next Generation: Finest Hour 73, Winter 1991-92. “Why study Churchill?” I am often asked. “Surely he has nothing to say to us today?” Yet in my own work, as I open file after file of Churchill’s archive, from his entry into Government in 1905 to…
From The Book of Regrets Compiled by Juliet Solomon as a fundraiser for the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery JR Books Ltd 2007 Having been fortunate in my life as a historian, writing the books I wanted to write and lecturing about my work to audiences worldwide, I have no regrets…
FT Magazine 29/30 July 2006 J.R.R. Tolkien and the Somme were inextricably linked. I learned this forty-four years ago, shortly after I was elected to my first university appointment, at Merton College, Oxford. I was twenty-six years old. In those days there was a strict seating order at college dinners.…
The impact of the Vrba-Wetzler Report of June 1944 and Raoul Wallenberg’s mission to Budapest, July 1944. As told to and quoted by Robin Vrba, Jewish Heritage Museum, New York, 6 May 2012 Introductory talk to Holocaust educators. The direct link between Rudi’s Report and Wallenberg was not through Sweden, but…
Published in Churchillians By-The-Bay. Quarterly E-Newsletter, Second Quarter, 2009. Volume 1, Number 2 – Became Glow-worm No one had more power – on paper at least – than Winston Churchill. On 10 May 1940, having become Prime Minister, he appointed himself Minister of Defence. He made up his government from all three…
Sir Martin writes: On 25 and 26 July 1939, five weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War – and while Churchill was still in opposition to the government of the day, in his tenth year in the political wilderness – senior Polish Intelligence officers in Warsaw handed over…
The Times, 27 January 2005 “Could Britain have done more to stop the horrors of Auschwitz?” Sir Martin writes: From the summer of 1942 until the spring of 1944 more than a million Jews were deported to Auschwitz, where they were either murdered upon arrival, or used as slave labourers.…