Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

Three times in my life I have wept because of a book. The first time I was a teenager reading a tear-jerker (a term I didn’t know yet). Mine got jerked.

But the second and third were and are great books. I wept--tears of pride--while reading Henriette Roosenburg’s “The Walls Came Tumbling Down.” Pride? Yes, pride that human beings can rise to such heights. Henriette Roosenburg was a member of the Dutch resistance during World War II. Caught, she was condemned to death but not immediately executed. She and about 50 other resisters formed the lowest class in a Nazi prison. They had no rights, almost no food. My tears came streaming down when she tells the story of the night when they were freed by the advancing Allied troops. There really are heroes, and she was one. It seemed to me an honor to belong to the same race.

Finally I wept with a mixture of sorrow and pride while reading “Far Rainbow.” This is a novella by Boris and Arkadi Strugatski, brothers who write the best science fiction to come out of Russia. We are not allowed much space, and mine is almost gone. So I’ll just say that many of the 2,000 or so people on the planet Far Rainbow, all about to die from a human error, are worthy to greet Roosenburg and her fellow prisoners as equals.

Note: Both books are long out of print. By a happy chance “Walls” is about to come back in. “Far Rainbow” in a good translation (Roosenburg wrote in English) can be found in libraries.