There are lawyers who turn to fiction literature like John Grisham and other lawyers like Philippe Sands that novelize reality from a commitment embodied in essays and other non-fiction books. Works interspersed with autobiographical snippets and chronicles of that alternative truth that slips under reality itself, in a water table with respect to what is commonly known.
Because in the performance robed of Sands it has been able to approach the most sordid of international politics. Even the very point at which novelizing something falls short and it is necessary that story closer to reality that does justice by knowing more unknown to ordinary citizens.
It's funny that I recently remembered Ben Pastor and today it is Sands who comes to this blog, but thematic synergies are like that, one thing reminds you of the other. If with Ben Pastor we enter the Third Reich from captivating fictions, With Sands we roam the offices of the high places of Nazi Germany to any other decision-making space in the world. Because it was and is there where the most pious lies that move the world are weighed, balanced and sold.
Top recommended books by Philippe Sands
Escape route
Any double life is insane to lead. Because bipolarity looms much more sinister than the simple psychiatric condition. Who are you the unfaithful man or woman or the exemplary couple? What is your skin that of the nice person or that of the serial killer? Nor do I tell you what it must be like, you drag your feet on the mat to enter each room while you wait for the ashes of your fascism to cling to that little rag under your feet ...
In July 1949, a man suffering from an acute liver disease was admitted to a hospital in Rome. It has been brought there by monks and it is registered under the name Reinhardt, which turns out to be a fake. He is visited by a bishop, a doctor and a Prussian lady. The patient ends up dying and the Prussian lady sends a letter to the family. The real name of the mysterious patient is Otto Wächter, and the letter from the Prussian lady will reach his wife, Charlotte, and then pass on to their children. It is the youngest of them, Horst, whom Philippe Sands locates, and when he visits him in the castle where he lives almost secluded, he tells him that "it is not true that my father died of an illness."
What then is the truth? And above all: who was the fake Reinhardt actually called Otto Wächter? With an inquiry procedure similar to that used in his previous book, the highly applauded East-West Street, Sands reconstructs the life of this individual who studied law in Vienna, left the city for Berlin, returned as a Nazi hierarch and removed the Jewish professors he had had at the university from their posts. He was later posted to Krakow, and there his signature is stamped on documents that led to the death of thousands of people, mostly Jews. And why did it end up in Rome? He was there on his way to South America, fleeing incognito, protected by some member of the Vatican ...
With the narrative pulse of the most fast-paced spy novel, Sands explores the motives that lead a man to commit heinous acts and reconstructs Europe's troubled past and the history of a family marked by the sins of the father ... An overwhelming and essential book .
East-West Street
The east west axis of the city of Berlin is much more than a geographical orientation. In fact the capriciously defined separation in the location of the point where the east begins or where the west begins determines the most sinister part of the history of the whole of Europe ...
Perhaps not so much from the symbol of these cardinal points specifically in Berlin, but from the symbol this rescued story is born as a brilliant intrahistory never so true and disconcerting.
Two threads are woven into the pages of this exceptional book: on the one hand, the rescue of the story of the author's maternal grandfather from his trip to give a lecture in the city of Lviv, which was Polish and is currently part from Ukraine. On the other, the adventures of two Jewish lawyers and a German defendant in the Nuremberg trial, whose lives also converge in that city invaded by the Nazis. The two Jews studied there and saved their lives because they emigrated on time - one to England, the other to the United States - and the defendant - also a brilliant lawyer and Hitler's legal adviser - was governor during the occupation.
And so, based on the subtle connections between these four characters - the grandfather, the two Jewish lawyers participating in Nuremberg, one with the British legal team and the other with the American, and the Nazi, a cultured man who ended up embracing barbarism–, the past emerges, the Shoah, History with capital letters and small intimate stories. And facing the horror arises the thirst for justice - the struggle of the two lawyers to introduce into the trial the concept of "crimes against humanity" - and the will to understand what happened, which leads the author to meet with the criminal's son Nazi.
The result: a book that shows that not everything was said about World War II and the genocide; a book that is at the same time a beautiful literary text with detective and judicial thriller overtones, an outstanding historical account about the Holocaust and the ideals of men who fight for a better world and a meditation on barbarism, guilt and desire of Justice. It is seldom so justified to apply the qualification of essential to a work.
The last colony
Colonization is linked to the most unexpected ambitions. And the ways of different empires or countries have nothing to do with colonizing. From Roman or Spanish integration to direct British usurpation wherever they went. On this occasion, beyond black legends disseminated interestedly about other colonial processes, this English author uncovers the thunder case about an event of complete alienation for the inhabitants of a remote place incorporated into the queen's empire...
On April 27, 1973, Liseby Elysé, then twenty years old and four months pregnant, boarded the ship leaving the small island of Peros Banhos, in the Chagos Archipelago, in the Indian Ocean. Traveling with her were the rest of the local inhabitants, who were going to be relocated to the island of Mauritius. The alternative was to stay and starve. The explanation for this forced exodus lies in the Cold War. For strategic reasons, in the sixties the Americans decided to install a military base in the archipelago, specifically on the island of Diego GarcÃa, and they did not want the native population on the nearby islands. The British had offered the place, because it was their colonial possession and in 1965 they separated it from Mauritius and converted it into the so-called British Indian Ocean Territory.
So, when Mauritius became independent in 1968, it did so without that archipelago, and then began litigating in court to try to get it back. In 2018 the case reached the International Court in The Hague. Philippe Sands was involved in that trial as the plaintiff's lawyer, and the star testimony he presented was that of Liseby Elysé, who told her personal tragedy before her court.
This is the little-known story that this overwhelming book tells about the last colony. A book about the shames of the past and about a native population torn from their homeland and deported to another place because of geostrategy. A book about colonialism and its legacies, but also about the small stories that lurk behind history in capital letters. After his two fundamental works on Nazism – East-West Street and Escape Route –, Philippe Sands offers us another anthological piece, which brilliantly mixes narrative, essay, historical facts and personal tragedies.
