Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

January 8, 2020

How the British Media Turned a Holocaust Survivor’s Name into a Byword for Shady Landlords

“Rachmanism.”

Born in Poland in 1919 to an acculturated Jewish family, Peter Rachman was captured by the Germans in World War II, escaped to the Soviet Union—where he was sent to a Siberian prison camp—and then was able to join a Polish army unit fighting under British command in the Middle East and Italy. After the war Rachman settled in England and began a career in real estate, eventually amassing a small fortune and dying in 1962. A year later, his incidental connection to a major political scandal attracted the attention of the tabloid press, as Caryl Phillips explains:

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