There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. French provides a wealth of historical detail about a vanished era in interwar Peking.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Having long lived in Peking, Werner sensed that such a murder had not been committed by Chinese, but by the foreigners who congregated at the watering hole the Grand Hotel des Wagons Lits, and they were not telling the truth. Still, the official inquest stalled, Peking fell to the Japanese and the case petered out, except that Pamela’s father doggedly took over, offering a reward and hiring his own detectives. She was scheduled to leave her school and return to England soon because of untoward advances made by her professor, and she had been courted by several men her father had disapproved of. Compelling details emerge about the attractive young woman. Detectives discovered that Pamela had been ice-skating with her girlfriend the night before and failed to make it home on her bicycle by dinnertime, as she had promised her father and cook. Initially, French pursues the official Chinese and British police angle, offering a grisly autopsy report and discussions of suspects such as Pamela’s father, ETC Werner, an old China hand and former British consul. 8, 1937, to the shock of the foreign community. The horribly mutilated body of a young woman, later identified as British schoolgirl Pamela Werner, was discovered at Fox Tower in Peking, on Jan. In this deft reconstruction of events from newspaper and police reports, diaries and archives, Shanghai-based historian French ( Through the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao, 2009, etc.) masterly portrays the graft-ridden milieu of pre–World War II China, where the arrogance of foreigners prevailed. A suspenseful murder mystery set on the eve of the Japanese invasion of old Peking in 1937.

Midnight in peking by paul french