THE UNIQUE horror of WW2 still hangs like a pall over the contemporary world and East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity — a remarkable combination of personal memoir, detective thriller and historical research — is another grim reminder of it.

International human rights lawyer Phillippe Sands was inspired to embark on this exhaustive quest by the total silence of his Jewish grandfather on his life before the war.

He came from Lemburg, now Lviv in Ukraine, one of those places that became the billiard ball of 20^th century warfare. His grandson’s curiosity led to the discovery that this was also the home of two remarkable legal minds who were to shape modern international law.

Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin held fiercely opposing beliefs on the approach to the problem that the allies faced in the Nuremberg trials — should the nazi criminals accused of grotesque, industrialised state sponsored mass murder be charged with crimes against humanity or genocide?

Sands explains the critical legal question, whether to negate the essential individual suffering by centring the world’s attention on the group, ethnic, national or religious issues.

The book climaxes in vivid accounts of the Nuremburg trials with particular attention on Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer and the “Butcher of Poland” who, as governor-general of nazi-occupied Poland, oversaw the mass extermination in the concentration camps of the territory.

So They Call you Pisher by Michael Rosen is a very different type of memoir although, like Sands, many of his extended Jewish family disappeared in the Holocaust.

Rosen is well-known for language programmes on the BBC, comic poetry for children delivered in his inimitable manner and the bitingly ironic Letter from a Curious Parent column in the Guardian. He trawls the memories of his own childhood and youth, among them summer camp in East Germany, the 1968 student turmoil and CND marches.

The Yiddish term pisher means “a pissy little person, a nothing” and the figure who emerges from what is in effect an affectionate posthumous letter to his father is anything but. Rosen comes across as an anarchic, self-critical, benevolent and warm-hearted human being.

In fiction, Munich by Robert Harris bears all the hallmarks of this author — detailed research, a page-turning style and an ability to convey the impression that the reader was there.

In this case, we are flies on the wall during the machinations around the infamous wheeling and dealings leading to the outbreak of war were conducted. If it makes you feel some sympathy for Chamberlain, then remember it is fiction.