The Path of Light

In 2021, Anthony Seldon, inspired by a fallen First World War soldier who dreamed of a "Via Sacra" to commemorate the war dead and stand as a marker for the triumph of peace, set out on a 600 mile walk tracing the historic route of the Western Front. He went on to recount that story in the widely acclaimed The Path of Peace. But there wasn't to be lasting peace, with the continent falling into an even more horrific war two decades later. In The Path of Light, Seldon sets out to walk a new 800 mile route from the same starting point at Kilometre Zero to Auschwitz, discovering in the towns and villages through which he walks stories of women and men who bravely protected the vulnerable and stood up to evil in the face of unimaginable brutality during the Second World War. As he ruminates on these "figures of light", whose uplifting stories he encounters along his path, a pattern begins to emerge about how we can draw on their lives to build a better and more peaceful world, never more needed than now, with the ominous and increasing drumbeat of belligerence globally that month by month is the constant backdrop of his walk between 2023 and 2025.