Marcus Ferrar

Marcus Ferrar writes about WWII, Communism, Germany and Eastern Europe, specialising in peoples with difficult historical heritages. He was a journalist and manager with Reuters for 30 years. During the Cold War he was for a time the only western correspondent in East Berlin. He subsequently covered all of Eastern Europe and reported the Portuguese revolution.

He lives in Oxford, where he is Chairman of the Friends of Summertown Library http://www.friendsofsummertownlibrary.org/. He had an English father and a German mother.

He published THE BUDAPEST HOUSE: A LIFE RE-DISCOVERED in 2013. A Hungarian Jew traumatised by the loss of half her family in Auschwitz returns to Budapest to retrace her roots, and discovers a dramatic personal history that enables her eventually to lift the burden of her past and move forward to a new life.

A FOOT IN BOTH CAMPS: A GERMAN PAST FOR BETTER AND FOR WORSE, published in 2012, is a historical memoir of an Anglo-German who grows up torn between British wartime heroes and kindly German relatives, resolving his conflict of loyalty only in the ruins of Dresden.

Together with John Corsellis, he wrote SLOVENIA 1945: MEMORIES OF DEATH AND SURVIVAL AFTER WORLD WAR II, published in 2005-2006 in English, Slovene and Italian. It recounted the British Army's repatriation of 12,000 Slovene soldiers to ex-Yugoslavia in 1945, their slaughter by Communists, and the scattering of civilian survivors around the world. In Slovenia, this book was a best-seller. In Britain it occasioned questions in Parliament and an expression of regret by a Foreign Office minister.

Marcus is a Trustee of the Dresden Trust http://dresdentrust.net/,and Chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board of The Baron, a web site on media trends http://thebaron.info/.

See also http://www.marcusferrar.org/ and http://mferrar.wordpress.com/