Hiding from the Nazis in wartime Italy

When memories come back to you, wrote W.G. Sebald in Austerlitz , his digressive novel about history and how it is remembered, their dreamlike quality sometimes makes you ‘feel as if you were looking at the past through a glass mountain’. Malcolm Gaskill’s exploration of the wartime adventures of his great-uncle Ralph, captured in Italian-occupied Libya in 1942, came from just such a memory, a ‘haunting’ dream experienced by his mother about her long-dead uncle. Finding a diary kept by Ralph while a prisoner, and fascinated by the ‘imperfections of memory’, Gaskill set off on a seven- year forage into the past that took him from archive to archive, retracing Ralph’s several attempts to escape. In the process he got to know the Italian families who sheltered him, some of them as intereste