In This Dark House

The author of this memoir is the youngest daughter of Berthold Lubetkin, an architect who came to prominence in Britain in the 1930s as one of the first modernists. He abruptly dropped out of London society just before the war and moved with his wife to the tiny village of Upper Killington in the Severn Valley where he raised a family in a house they named "World's End". There, he kept his family in utter isolation, in their own world where his word was law. A tryant and a bully, he dominated his wife and family absolutely and it was not until after his death that his daughter came to know the precise nature of the devils which drove him on. Lubetkin's family had died at Auschwitz, unacknowledged by a son who had never tried to save them and who had never forgiven himself.