Red Saint, Pink Daughter (Paperback)

In this biography of her mother ("Red Saint") and autobiography ("Pink Daughter") Silvia Rodgers gives an account of her off-centre life, always in the wrong place at the most perilous time, and in difficult company, whether Polish child in the German capital, or Jewish child in a German school. Rodgers's mother was a Polish Jewish Communist in the Weimar Republic as the storm gathered. She was a "political" saint - as a mother she was not so saintly. Race and politics became problems as the Nazis rose: she remembers book burnings, the marauding Brownshirts, knocks at the door. She also offers an account of her family's flight from Berlin. Arriving in a less than hospitable England, the culture shock of war- and post-war Britain is recalled; also the loss of friends and relatives killed in the concentration camps. Rodgers gradually made her own life, marrying the Labour politician Bill Rodgers of the "Gang of Four", and becoming a writer.