The Rat Line

• The Fourth Reich by Magnus Linklater, Isabel Hilton and Neal Ascherson
  Hodder, 352 pp, £9.95, November 1984, ISBN 0 340 34443 1
• I didn’t say goodbye by Claudine Vegh
  Caliban, 179 pp, £7.95, October 1984, ISBN 0 904573 93 1

By chance, the evening I took this book to bed for the painful reading expected, I jabbed the tooth of a comb down a fingernail and cried out. As a reminder of what Klaus Barbie was about, not just at the Hotel Terminus in Lyon forty years ago but at the Bolivian Joint Chiefs of Staff headquarters in La Paz as late as 1980, the moment served. An inkling of the more enduring wounds for which Barbie was proud to share responsibility can be gathered from Claudine Vegh’s I didn’t say goodbye, a labour of love rather than literature in which the surviving children of French Jewish deportees talk to a psychiatrist who shared their experience: ‘I didn’t have a youth, I no longer have a mother, I have a sister who needs treatment, a father who hasn’t been able to lead a normal life since he came back. An entire existence ruined.’