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. Nor does she neglect the less elaborate means employed to dispose of poor people’s corpses through the ages.įrom plague-pit burial to grand heraldic cortege, a straightforward memento mori.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

As the 20th century came to an end, Arnold supposes, “the stiff upper lip gave way to the bleeding heart.” The author offers brief biographies of a few notable graveyard residents and notes the last rites of rich and famous Britons from Elizabeth I to Princess Diana. During Widow Victoria’s reign, cemetery landscaping flourished from Highgate to West Norwood. Body-snatching Resurrection Men provided corpses to medical students. Both the living and dead populations of the metropolis increased. Displays of black crape and plumes were public badges of mourning. In the 18th century, the undertaking trade thrived along with sepulchral monuments, mausolea and melancholy. After the Great Fire, tombstones rose as architect Sir Christopher Wren, disgusted by interment within church buildings, promoted suburban final resting places. We follow the course of the Grim Reaper through plague years witnessed by Samuel Pepys and Daniel Defoe. She describes the city’s medieval Danse Macabre. The author digs up details about the noxious effluvia of human putrescence in London.

In this history of the removal of deceased people, we learn, for example, that the Piccadilly underground line had to be rerouted because of the density of bones in the way of construction. Everything you always wanted to know about perishing in London.

Necropolis by Catharine Arnold