torthúil reads

I have tried a few times to read Gulag Archipelago. I remember it being present in my childhood home as it was one of my dad’s favourite books. He lived through WWII / Nazi occupation in Greece as a very young child  (b. 1938, d. 2016). He was permanently affected by early traumatic experiences (witnessing mass executions and fleeing bombing raids, for example).  Over the years of my childhood and youth, the shelves of our home accumulated more and more fiction and non fiction books about the wars of the 20th century: everything from pulp fiction to serious historical material. We did not have a TV till I was 11, but used to have periodic family movie weekends where we would rent a projector and a pile of movie reels from the library, hang blankets over the windows and watch one film after another. There was no specific criteria for how these films were selected, but among them were documentaries with footage of the Nazi death camps. I remember seeing the gas chamber...