Timewatch

During the Nazi occupation of eastern Poland, a small group of Jews tried to save themselves by hiding in the sewers under the city. Four survivors talk about their fourteen-month ordeal of living below ground.

Leading historian Eric Hobsbawn offers Peter France some insights into his personal understanding of the 19th century and, in the process a world that was about to disappear for ever.

It has always been believed that the attack on Pearl Harbour was a total surprise, but witnesses from around the world are now coming forward with stories of Washington being repeatedly warned of the attack.

Introduced by Christopher Andrew. Two stories tonight reflect the contribution made to history by non-professionals.

Christopher Andrew presents two eye-witness accounts of the past - 500 years apart. The 15th-century letters of Margaret Paston push aside people's misconceptions about medieval women as passive objects and Harriet Walter brings to life a woman of immense strength, resourcefulness and courage. The second film provides startling testimony to a horrifying episode of post-war murder of Polish Jews, filmed secretly by a crew from the Polish trade union Solidarity. Few films from eastern Europe have raised such disturbing questions.

Documentary revealing new evidence about the so-called "Night of the Long Knives" - Harold MacMillan's Cabinet re-shuffle of July 1962, in which he sacked the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a third of the Cabinet.

Did the atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki really shorten the war and save Allied lives? Based on American archive records, this dramatic account of the decision to use the atomic bomb reveals the reality of power politics - and pinpoints the origins of the Cold War.

Documentary exploring how poverty in the English countryside in the years before the First World War, has been hidden behind an image of a rural paradise created by artists, writers and poets of the period which survives to the present day, as demonstrated by the huge success of Edith Holden's "Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady"

Leon Trotsky was one of the architects of the Russian Revolution and creator of the Red Army. Brilliant and eloquent, and expected to succeed Lenin, he was forced into exile, airbrushed out of Soviet history and murdered in 1940 on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin. Today, as Stalin's terrible heritage is being slowly dismantled, this film, using archive footage and personal memoirs, looks at the life and ideas of the revolutionary who was the dictator's first and greatest enemy.

During the Second World War, Italian forces in Yugoslavia murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians. Historians have now exposed the startling political reasons why there was never an Italian equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials. Michael Bryant narrates the story of the implementation of Mussolini's policy of Italianisation in the Balkans.

At the end of the Second World War, conclusive evidence of war crimes was presented against more than 1,200 high-ranking Italian Fascists. Yet despite constant protests from the governments of Yugoslavia, Greece and Ethiopia, not one Italian war criminal was ever extradited to stand trial for crimes committed during the Italian occupation of their countries. Michael Bryant tells the story of how, for political and military reasons, the British and American governments chose to block the extradition of any Italian war criminals, many of whom by then held key positions in the Italian government.