This Friday afternoon I'm (alongside eating biscuits, of course) working on a book we're publishing next summer, a new English translation of a memoir by Moritz Nachtstern, a Norwegian Jew who survived the Holocaust because of his skills as a typographer which led to his involvement in Operation Bernhard.
Ours will be the first English edition of this book. A lovely woman called Margrit Rosenberg Stenge has been painstakingly translating it for us, and a few months ago I asked her for a few biographical details to use in our publicity material, as normal. She sent me a modest few sentences, and then said that if I were interested to read more, a fuller version of her story was available online. I was intrigued and went to take a look. Well, a look just wasn’t enough, and I spent the next half an hour glued to it, wanting to read the whole thing. I thought it was so good that I shared it with the office, and now I'd like to share it with you. You can find it here.
I think her story is amazing, and it adds another dimension to know that she is now busy making the stories of others available to a new audience. Stories, first-hand accounts and anecdotes always bring history alive for me, and they stick in my memory when facts and figures have all but faded away. For this reason, I’m excited that we are publishing this book, and hope that other people will gain as much from reading Moritz’s and Margrit’s stories as I have.