Walking the Path of Light was an uphill battle in several ways. The 72-year-old had to fit it in around an unexpected new day job – taking over at Epsom College after its previous head was shot dead by her husband. In the middle of the walk, he was diagnosed with significant heart disease. He is also candid about struggling to find both “an audience and enthusiasm for the whole project”.
“I’m not certain how much the world wants to know about human goodness,” he laments. “I think the world is much more eager to know about bad people. Look at Netflix, look at Amazon.”
On top of all of that, Seldon said it was a hard task unearthing the “figures of light” who would populate his book. “We know about Oskar Schindler, again and again. But where were all the other figures who maybe were far greater human beings, but whose lives we don’t know about?”
The book is dedicated to two of them: a German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer – hanged on April 9, 1945 for his opposition to Nazism – and Etty Hillesum, an Amsterdam Jew gassed at Auschwitz, whose diaries should be better known. And it opens with a verse from the Book of John (“God is light; in him there is no darkness at all”) and closes with two more on light – one from Genesis and another from John.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer[Missing Credit].jpg?f=3x2&w=732&q=0.6)
Etty Hillesum[Missing Credit]
The ecumenical approach echoes Seldon himself, who says he feels “very Jewish, if that’s possible to feel very Jewish while being a Christian”. He was born to a Christian mother, Marjorie, and Arthur, a Jewish father, who was orphaned at three when his Ukrainian parents – who had fled the pogroms to the East End – were killed by the Spanish flu. Seldon suspects remnants of his family were murdered by Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units at Babyn Yar.
He was baptised and confirmed, but as a student fell in love with Joanna Pappworth, converting under Reform’s Hugo Gryn to wed at West London Synagogue, and says he was “so proud to marry a Jewish girl”.
But following her death, in 2016, he converted back to Christianity to marry his second wife, another teacher, Sarah Sayer. “To me, it makes perfectly logical sense, but someone’s own faith journey usually makes no sense to anybody else.”
A large number of Seldon’s heroes are Jews (including Auschwitz survivor Gryn, Ben Helfgott, Alfred Wiener and Zalman Gradowski), but, perhaps inevitably with such a brief, the majority are not. Is this problematic, this overemphasis on non-Jewish saviours to the exclusion of Jewish stories of the Shoah?
Zalman Gradowski and his wife, Sonia ( Credit :Libe Friedman-Ahuava Glick)[Missing Credit]
The late Rabbi Hugo Gryn with his son, David (Credit: David Gryn)[Missing Credit]
Dara Horn has covered the terrain in 2021’s People Love Dead Jews. Tanya Gold revisited it in Shameless, a lengthy 2025 essay for Jewish Quarterly – describing the “Christian imperative” at the heart of Sophie’s Choice and “Christian imagery imposed on Jewish death” in Schindler’s List – though the debate has been going on at least since the latter was released more than 30 years ago.
Seldon thinks the question misguided. “I don’t think it’s a fair characterisation to say that there are not, from the beginning through the middle to the end, many Jewish figures.” And, equally important, he thinks that that if one wants to reach out through Holocaust education, “talking about those who were non-Jewish is a way in.
“The book is constantly asking, where were all the others? Where were the Catholics? Where were the Lutherans? How can we ensure that it doesn’t happen again? Why did so few people stand up against it? What were the qualities and characteristics of those people [who did]?”
Those who did, and who he celebrates in his book, include the Polish Franciscan friar Maximilian Kolbe who volunteered to die instead of a man called Franciszek Gajowniczek at Auschwitz. We also read about Albert Goering, a one-time resident of Neuenburg am Rhein “who would go down on his knees to scrub streets in solidarity with Jews while his brother – the Luftwaffe supremo Hermann – was busy liquidating them.” Seldon came across his story early in his walk when he was crossing the Rhine from Alsace into Germany.
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Franciscan friar Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to die in place of Franciszek Gajowniczek at Auschwitz in 1941[Missing Credit]
In Nuremberg the distinguished historian learnt about Hermann Luppe, the city’s mayor, who in his attempt to ban the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer in the 1930s, endured a long fight with its editor, Julius Streicher. Denounced as a “Jew lover”, Luppe was forced out of his job and the city by the Nazis. He settled in his home town of Kiel where he was, in a terrible paradoxy, killed by an RAF bomb, days before the war ended.
Israel also features in a “tiny part” of his book. “I ask, should it be judged by standards higher than other nations? I don’t answer the question, but the implication is no it shouldn’t be.”
The eminent knight, educator, biographer of eight prime ministers and number one bestselling author who has written or edited more than 40 books also makes a revealing admission, while we discuss the planned final volume in the trilogy, The Path to War, which would be “about the Third World War” and take him from the Nazi death factory in Poland to the new frontlines, in Kyiv.
The voice is always in my head saying, ‘You are such a loser.’ I am always plagued by self-doubt. I never think I will be able to do anything
“Until I write any book, I never think I can do it. The voice is always in my head saying, ‘You are such a loser.’ And I’m always plagued by self-doubt. I never think I’ll be able to do anything.”
He also points out he is only now finally finding his voice – writing titles not just of the mind but ones that are “heart-driven and holistic”.
That may go some way to explaining the breathtaking work ethic. “You’re mad,” his wife says when he tells her he is writing six books at once. This is no exaggeration. Still to come are tomes on Brexit, Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, atheism and Jonathan Sacks (he has been commissioned by the late chief rabbi’s family to write the authorised biography).
All the while, Seldon is waiting for heart bypass surgery. It provides the perfect analogy for his ongoing quest. He says that both “the problems I had with my own heart on that trip” and “the opening of the heart” brought about by his search for light “were a metaphor for a transition which I’m in the midst of. People who are open-hearted are more compassionate and less judgmental. That’s the journey that I’m on, and that I’m trying to take people on.”
The Path of Light: Walking to Auschwitz, by Anthony Seldon, is published by Atlantic Books
